I put scarlet runner beans in a trial bed two seasons back expecting a novelty vine with red flowers. I got 4kg of beans off three plants before the dwarf beans next to them had finished flowering. That’s the bit nobody tells you: this thing was never bred as food first, and it still out-produces the beans that were.
Where it came from
Phaseolus coccineus is native to the cool highlands of Mexico and Central America, where growers had been cultivating it for food long before Europeans ever saw it. It made its way to Britain around the 1600s, and for a couple of centuries after that, English and European gardeners grew it purely as an ornamental climber. The flowers (scarlet, sometimes white or bicoloured) were the point. Eating the pods was almost an afterthought for a good 200 years of its life in European gardens, even though it had been a genuine staple crop back home. I find that a bit funny. We spent two centuries admiring a vegetable.
What it actually does
It’s technically a perennial with a tuberous root, though most of us grow it as an annual because our winters finish it off. The vines climb hard, I’ve had mine hit 3m up a trellis before I could get out there with the secateurs. The pods run long, up to 30cm, and the beans inside are big, mottled purple and black, with a starchier, meatier bite than a common bean once dried. I pick some young for a fresh green bean, but honestly the dried bean is where this variety earns its keep. It also handles cooler summer temperatures better than common beans do, which matters more than people think, because most beans just sulk and drop flowers once the heat climbs past the low thirties. This one keeps setting pods.
Where to grow it in Australia
If you’re in a cool temperate zone (Tasmania, the Victorian highlands, southern NSW tablelands), this is your bean. It’ll crop through a mild summer that would stall a regular climbing bean. In subtropical zones like mine here in Dayboro, I get good early results but the flowers drop once we hit sustained high heat and humidity, so I plant early and give it afternoon shade through the worst of it. In arid and semi-arid zones, treat it the same way, shade cloth or an eastern wall, and don’t expect it to love a 40°C run. It’s a highlands bean at heart. It just tolerates the rest of us.
How to source seed
I haven’t found it stocked as a mainstream supermarket seedling, so it’s a seed packet job. Diggers Club and Green Harvest both carry heritage bean lines and are worth checking, and local seed savers groups often have scarlet runner seed passed down through their own gardens, which is arguably more interesting than anything I could sell you. The only hard part is convincing yourself it’s not just there for the flowers.
