Anyone heard of Entada gigas? It's a liana which has a neotropical distribution and holds the record for the largest pod, yet despite this fame there is a serious lack of information about it on the web. We used to find them washed up on our favourite beach near Cape Town presumably having floated there from places like Mozambique. I have also seen them sold as necklaces in shops. I decided to have a go at germinating one once, but they have a really tough seed coat. I dropped it in boiling water and left it to soak, but it didn't seem to have an effect so I repeated this process another three times and then gave up on that idea. I decided to carefully scarify it mechanically with a sharp swiss army knife and planted it, low and behold two weeks later something began to emerge from the soil. It grew very quickly, but didn't put on leaf growth which I thought was really odd, surely it needed to start photosynthesizing as soon as possible. It did however strike me that coming from such a large 'bean' probably meant it had a decent store of endosperm to live off. I placed it in a very bright position where it continued to grow upwards into a very long tendril sort of stem and still bore no signs of leaves of branches. Much to my dissapointment it died a few days later. Whether this was due to lack of heat, humidity or support I don't know.

Here is a picture of the beans:

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and the pod:

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