06/07/2026
BUENA MULATA PEPPER – THIS RARE HEIRLOOM CAYENNE HAS ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE ORIGIN STORIES IN THE SEED WORLD.
Horace Pippin was a self-taught painter from West Chester, Pennsylvania, who became one of the most celebrated American folk artists of the 20th century. He served in World War I, where a German sniper's bullet left his right arm partially paralyzed. He taught himself to paint by guiding his right hand with his left, and went on to create vivid, deeply personal works depicting Black everyday life, the horrors of war, and the injustices of segregation. The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. holds his paintings today.
But Pippin was also a passionate gardener and seed collector, and that's where your pepper enters the story.
Pippin was friends with the grandfather of William Woys Weaver, a well-known food historian and seedsman in Pennsylvania. The two men traded what they had — Pippin gave seeds, Weaver's grandfather gave bee-sting therapy for Pippin's war-injured arm. When Weaver's grandfather died, those seeds went into a basement freezer and sat for decades. When Weaver finally thawed the collection out in the 1960s, he found several extraordinary peppers that Pippin had stewarded — including the now-famous Fish Pepper, and this one: the Buena Mulata.
What strikes people about the Buena Mulata is that it looks exactly like something an artist would have chosen to grow. It opens a deep, vivid purple, then travels through salmon, orange, and brown before settling into deep red — and because the fruits ripen at different rates, a single plant carries all those colors at once. Pippin apparently had a particular eye for peppers with unusual color and exceptional flavor, and this one has both.
Available in our shop: https://www.wncurbanfarms.com/shop-seedlings?page=2
