My friend Brandon’s habanero pepper plant, named Hector, flowered this December, and gave us a peek at life in the making.

In temperate climates, habaneros usually flower in spring or summer. Hector, however, seems to be confused: it is an indoor plant, and its home atop Brandon’s heater perhaps inspired this midwinter bloom.

I dissected the flower to see what was inside, bisecting the peduncle and ovary. On the slide, the green blob focused into fine-scale structure:

…cells! The cell walls and nuclei are visible; they’re of varying shapes and sizes.

I wonder what the big blobs are (two: the oblong-pointy one, and the round one, both in the upper right). They are perhaps bubbles on the foldscope slide? I had expected to see ovules, but I’m not sure if they are visible in these photos – unless these cells are all ovules? Habanero peppers do have a lot of seeds…

Here’s another, zoomed in:

In the upper left, where there is a cluster of darker dots: are these all nuclei? A cell-division frontier?

Here’s one more:

Life starts like this. Somewhere in this green scramble, this cell-packed cradle of future children of Hector, pollen grain meets ovule, and life takes its first green step into being.

I conducted this project as part of Professor Pringle’s EEB321 class at Princeton University.