Surprisingly, peppers have grown into trees after 3 years of raising them.

The popularity of peppers is far beyond imagination. In some areas, growing peppers is like growing other vegetables. Every household will grow some to ensure that they can eat the freshest peppers.

However, we plant peppers just like other vegetables. The harvest is harvested in the same year, and the pepper plants will hardly grow into the second year.

However, there are often people on the Internet who can plant peppers into trees. For example, a netizen posted a video a while ago, claiming that he had raised a "chili tree" for three years, and everyone praised her.

It is not difficult to find from the branches that this netizen's "chili tree" has obviously become lignified, and it really looks like a small shrub, not an annual herb at all.

However, netizens did not buy it. Many netizens expressed doubts, thinking that it was just belladonna or some other tree. Some netizens said that they had subverted their three views. For the first time, they knew that peppers can still survive the winter.

Peppers are defined as herbs, but how can herbs survive winter and grow woody branches and trunks?

Why do herbal peppers grow into trees?

Chili peppers are closely related to the familiar tomatoes. Their origins are actually the Americas. They are plants brought to the Old World after Columbus discovered the New World.

Although in the origin of peppers, local indigenous people will indeed grow them for consumption, but also like tomatoes, Columbus originally introduced peppers not for eating, but as ornamental plants.

It was only around the end of the Ming Dynasty that chili peppers spread to China, where they were developed as a condiment for dishes and spread in many parts of China.

The scientific name of pepper is Capsicum annuum, in which "annuum" means "annual", but pepper is not an annual in its origin, but a perennial plant, which can survive several times without experiencing severe frost. Season, and grow into large shrubs, it is estimated that the local indigenous planting peppers should be somewhat similar to our planting peach trees, pear trees and other fruit trees.

The reason why it is named "annuum", I personally think it has a lot to do with the fact that it was first introduced in Europe and was popularized in Europe. The cold winter in Europe made this plant unable to spend the winter, and it was "annual". The nomenclature is a good way to distinguish it from other Capsicum species in its place of origin.

In fact, as a crop, in ancient times when technology was underdeveloped, annual growth had many benefits, the most critical of which was that it could be better selectively bred to produce the most suitable version for our consumption.

Tomatoes are also perennials in the native region of America. They also became annuals after they entered the Old World. In fact, the earliest tomatoes were slightly poisonous and had a more sour taste. In short, it was definitely not what we liked. It is still reflected in the wild species.

The ancients' method of selective plant breeding was to simply screen out the most delicious and growing fruits, leave their seeds, and then plant and select them year after year. This is how tomatoes are cultivated to their current taste. of.

The advantage of annual is that the cycle of selective breeding will be greatly shortened. Perhaps pepper has also gone through this road. Its subsequent widespread promotion and popularity may have a lot to do with it becoming an annual plant.

Many people may also wonder why peppers, which are herbs, and other similar plants can grow into shrubs?

Why do herbs grow into shrubs?

It is estimated that many people cannot understand why it is classified as a herb since it can grow into a shrub.

Herbaceous plants refer to those plants with only a few lignified cells in their rhizomes, so the rhizomes of these plants are relatively fragile and it is difficult to survive the cold winter.

But note that there are few lignified cells here, not none. For most herbs, given enough time to grow, it can also accumulate lignified stems.

Usually the reason they don't have enough time to grow is because of the temperature changes in the four seasons, so if you grow greens in Africa where the temperature is above 20 degrees Celsius all year round, it can also grow very strong stems.

I saw this on a video before. A blogger brought Chinese greens to Africa to grow them. As a result, the greens grew very tall, and the blogger could eat a few leaves every day.

Since many herbaceous plants will be frozen to death by frost, there is a criterion for judging such plants, which is to see whether they can grow annual rings (the annual rings are grown by the changes of the seasons of trees). If there are no annual rings, it will basically be judged. For the herb, not to see if it can grow lignified stems.

Many herbs do not have branches of woody plants, but some perennial herbs do. Solanaceae basically have such branches, so when peppers are not frozen to death, they can really grow into shrubs.

Finally: Strange Herb Angiosperms

The evolution of land plants started from primitive mosses, which came out of water, and their survival and reproduction are inseparable from water; then they developed primitive ferns, which are similar to mosses and are dwarf plants that grow on the ground , while requiring water for sexual reproduction; until about 385 million years ago, the first tall trees (with trunks and branches) began to appear, and the plants that initiated this "foresting" revolution were the most primitive seed plants —Paleoferns, gymnosperms with fern-like characteristics, which were adapted to harsh, dry terrestrial environments.

In fact, the evolution of tall trees is because the appearance of seeds is more reasonable, because taller bodies can get more seeds and thus get more opportunities for dissemination.

Then the problem comes, many herbs are another branch of seed plants - angiosperms, gymnosperms and angiosperms are considered to be two branches of seed plants that have co-evolved, and currently all gymnosperms have gone to perennial woods This plant, why does angiosperms appear as annual and perennial herbs?

In fact, the evolution of angiosperms is a mystery, because no fossils have been found for a long time, so some people think that the earliest angiosperms should be magnolias, which are perennial woody plants, and then evolved into annuals many times And perennial herbs, of course, some people think that the earliest should be herbs.

In any case, the herbaceous angiosperms actually resumed their ancestral growth form, making themselves dwarfed.

However, as we said earlier, as seed plants, such a growth form is actually very unfavorable for their survival and reproduction, but herbs still appear.

Climate change was the earliest thought to be the driver of the evolution of herbaceous angiosperms, where herbaceous plants avoid damage from winter frosts by discarding their above-ground biomass.

However, some recent studies have found that while herbs are less viable than woody species, they are better than woody species in the face of a variety of risks, including frost and herbivory, among other hard-to-predict risks.

It is precisely because angiosperms have herbs, a group with super risk-resistant ability, that they have completely replaced the big brother gymnosperms and ancestral ferns in the next 100 million years of climate change, becoming the most dominant green plants in the world—— 80% of all green plants.