Photographs of this planting through the 2026 season, oldest first.
The photographs
Week of 15 JuneA Serrano pepper on 19 June, drawn up leggy on one downy stem with a shoot breaking at every lower axil, its oldest leaves spread flat and level and the newest gathered into a loose head at the top, alone in a dry raked bed in bright flat light.Week of 22 JuneA Serrano pepper after rain on 23 June, one cream-white bud nodding off a curved stalk at the shoot tip and a tight cluster of green buds in the fork beside it, and a small dark insect banded with pale tucked into a leaf axil below.Week of 22 JuneA Serrano on 24 June, thin and barely a dozen leaves, carrying one bud nodding at a fork and a second standing erect higher up, its stems finely white-hairy, with the hard midday sun laying sharp bars of shadow across the straw around it.Week of 13 JulyA Serrano pepper on 16 July with eight or nine flowers out at once, each creamy white with narrow lobes curling back from the tube and all nodding downward, and one fruit already set — a blackish-green ovoid sitting upright — in warm low sun.Week of 20 JulyA Serrano pepper on 21 July, one narrow white bell only half reflexed with a dark anther showing in its mouth and a first fruit set below it, the kaolin clay lying only on the older leaves while the translucent new growth above stays clean.Week of 20 JulyTwo fingers hold a Serrano pepper open on 21 July so one slender dark fruit shows deep in the shade with a smaller one set at the node above it, and beyond the bed sun-bleached grass and then the woodland closing off the frame.Week of 3 AugustSerranos on 5 August hanging straight down in loose clusters off purple-tinged nodes, each slim cylinder blunt-tipped rather than pointed and streaked with a faint pale bloom, with white flowers and pinhead fruitlets still coming at the branch tips.Week of 17 AugustSerrano chilies on 20 August, fourteen of them hanging blunt-tipped and still uniformly green, faintly ribbed at the shoulder and a few hooked, with the sun coming from behind them and the treeline beyond broken into bright points of light.Week of 7 SeptemberTwo Serranos hang side by side on 7 September, one still mid-green and glossy, the other turning shoulder-down through near-black olive into a band of mahogany brown and then dull russet at the tip — matte and faintly dusty where its neighbor shines.
