How2Day: Green Bean Plants With Flowers

Scarlet runner bean vines produce ornamental color and edible green beans. Anna Yu/Photodisc/Getty Images
All green bean plants that produce seedpods and seeds or beans also produce flowers, which eventually become beans. Most bean flowers are white or off-white and not particularly memorable. Other bean plants are known for their dramatic, colorful blossoms, though the pods, beans, roots and leaves of these plants may also be eaten -- but in some cases, only after adequate cooking.

Green bean plants known for their colorful flowers are vigorous vining beans, cousins of garden-variety pole beans that bloom and produce green beans throughout the summer growing season and often into fall. Unlike bush beans, which flower and produce bean pods all at once, vining or pole beans will continue to flower and produce as long as mature bean pods are harvested. Pole bean vines will grow to 6 feet tall or more and require sturdy fences, trellises or other support. Bean vines are useful in smaller gardens, because their vertical growth habit is a very efficient use of space.

Phaseolus coccineus, or scarlet runner bean, produces very vigorous, dark green 10- to 15-foot vines and large scarlet, pink-red or two-colored blooms that attract hummingbirds as well as humans. The pods have a rich flavor, and are quite delicious and tender when picked young, or between 4 and 6 inches long, for use as snap beans. Cook pods before eating. When bean pods get larger -- and tougher -- the immature beans can be shelled fresh for use as horticultural beans or allowed to fully mature and dry before shelling, when beans can be cooked like any dry beans. Central America Indians are known to eat the plant's roots. The scarlet runner bean may also known as scarlet conqueror, fire, mammoth, red giant, scarlet emperor, and white Dutch runner bean.

In the U.S. heat-loving Lablab purpureus or hyacinth bean, with its 20-foot vines and memorable purple flowers, is grown primarily as an ornamental annual vine. In tropical Africa and India, however, it is a perennial, and a very important food crop. The tender young pods -- either purple or green, depending on the cultivar -- should be eaten only after cooking, because the seeds can contain toxins. Mature, dried beans are the primary concern, however, because they contain poisonous cacogenic glycosides. Boiling beans twice -- and changing the water in between -- deactivates the toxins. Plant leaves are also eaten as greens prepared similarly to spinach. Particularly decorative in the garden is the purple-leafed form of hyacinth bean.

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