SWAMPSCOTT – Paolina Lepore has been conducting an impressive experiment with a pretty prominent pepper plant but now she has a perplexing problem – people are pilfering the produce.Situated just outside the front door of Humphrey Street’s Caffe Paolina is a pepper plant that Lepore, who owns the café with her husband Vincenzo, coaxed into existence from seeds. Tied up with a bright red ribbon, it is unusual in that it stands nearly four feet tall, offers both hot and sweet peppers in very distinctive shapes and is in fact still producing so late in the season.Perhaps it is the latter that has made it attractive to pepper pickers as well.Lepore said she has noticed that a number of the peppers have gone missing. She laughed, however, when she said some have been found lying on the sidewalk with a bite taken out of them. While the plant produces both sweet and hot peppers, it’s impossible to tell which are which on sight. She believes the withered peppers on the ground were hot and that fact came as a surprise to those who thought to pocket a pepper.Or it might have been the shape of the peppers that first caught the potential pickers’ peepers.The tiny red and green peppers are almost bell-like in shape but when flipped over they take on the look of a flower or a face. Lepore has three peppers she picked drying on a shelf inside and two bear very distinctive faces – the more they wither the more they look like tiny old men.Lepore said the produce gets its unusual shape because the seeds are a cross between a pepper plant and a flower.Lepore said she could not remember the type of flower, but that is not unusual. Cross-pollination is common with pepper plants and origins can become confusing. Lepore said plants like hers have been growing outside the homes of her relatives in Calabria, Italy for ages and that is where her seeds came from.”They grow like a bush you have to trim them back, ” she said. “The seeds came from my relatives. I planted them (inside) in March then moved them outside in July.”Because the weather is mild in Calabria, the pepper plants will survive all year. Lepore said she is experimenting with the plant in Swampscott as well as several at her home in Revere to see how long the plants will hold up here.”I have one inside and one in the (outside) hall at my home in Revere,” she said. “This one I will leave outside and see if it comes back in the spring.”The leaves on the Swampscott plant are now limp and clearly it will not be long before they will surrender to the season. Lepore admitted said she doesn’t hold out a lot of hope that the plant will return in the spring.”I have been cooking them for me, but not in the restaurant,” she said while fingering a small flower-like pepper. “Supposedly they will come back next year. In Italy they would come back but here it’s so cold, so maybe not.”In the meantime customers can enjoy the Christmassy plant while it lasts and woe to the pepper pilferer that picks a potent pepper.