Dragon Tongue

Dragon Tongue's pods are a buffed cream to pale yellow color streaked and mottled with burgundy-purple markings that fade away once the beans are cooked, though the sweet, nutty flavor remains. Harvested young as snap beans, the stringless pods are tender, crisp, and succulent, offering that same sweet, nutty taste whether eaten fresh or briefly cooked. Inside, the seeds are firm, slightly starchy, and marked with pink-to-purple stripes while fresh, and once shelled they show a small, ovate, slightly curved shape in pale pistachio green.

Dragon Tongue can be picked young and used whole as a snap bean, pod and seed together, or left on the plant to mature into a shell bean grown solely for its seeds. Growers know pods are ready for the table once purple variegations appear against the pod's cream color, at which point the entire bean is edible. As the pods finish coloring from lime green to yellow with bright purple striping, they are best suited for cooking or freezing, while beans left to dry fully on the vine can be saved and used as a dried bean.

Flowers convert to harvestable pods in approximately 12 to 15 days, and the plants establish better from direct sowing into warm soil than from transplanting. The variety draws Mexican bean beetles, which can defoliate plants quickly if not scouted and hand-picked or treated, and it shows moderate susceptibility to bacterial blight and white mold in humid conditions, best managed by avoiding overhead watering to limit spore spread.

Dragon Tongue is an open-pollinated heirloom bean first cultivated in the Netherlands in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, from where it traveled to France and England before reaching the New World. It has since naturalized across a wide range of American climates, adapting well to heat and humidity. Along the way it has also been known under other names, including Dragon Langerie and Merveille (or Meraviglia) del Piemonte.