Photographs of this planting through the 2026 season, oldest first.
The photographs
Week of 1 JuneA Thai Dragon pepper on 4 June, set so far to one side that it holds only a corner of the frame — ten or twelve leaves in a rosette, margins faintly wavy, a fine short pubescence along the youngest midribs catching the sun.Week of 1 JuneA Thai Dragon pepper on 5 June, still all leaf and no bud — a dozen blades crowded into a rosette at the shoot tip, each drawn to a long point and quilted between sunken veins, one pale new shoot breaking at the crown under hard direct sun.Week of 29 JuneA Thai Dragon pepper on 29 June with every vein stained dark purple-maroon, so the tracery reads right through each blade where the low sun shines from behind it, the new growth still bunched and folded at the tip and rimmed with light.Week of 6 JulyA slender plant on 6 July throwing two long bare side stems out left and right, one of them nearly leafless, its growing tip chewed down to a ragged pale tuft and the leaves below it shot through with small holes, in flat overcast.Week of 6 JulyA Thai Dragon pepper on 9 July, one straight stem throwing side shoots in pairs at every node and flushed dark purple-brown at each junction, its narrow leaves speckled thick with kaolin — the lowest one hanging to the mulch, gone uniformly yellow.Week of 10 AugustThai Dragon chilies on 10 August, eight or nine slender pods held erect and angled outward, evenly tapered and curved like sickles and all still glossy grass-green, with three or four white flowers open among the leaves and one bud nodding below.Week of 10 AugustA Thai Dragon pepper on 10 August, unusually broad at the top: a wide three-lobed shoulder narrowing unevenly down a creased and dented body to a blunt tip hooked out to the left, brown corky scarring sunk in the well where the stalk meets it.Week of 31 AugustThai Dragon chilies on 3 September, several of them curving upward rather than hanging, pale green and beaded with rain, with the one in front turning bronze-gold along its whole length and dark trees blurred behind.Week of 21 SeptemberThai Dragon peppers on 22 September, mid harvest with roughly five scarlet pods and five still glossy green, the largest red one angling up and out while another hangs tip down. Flat overcast light keeps the color saturated.
