The Black Bean

The seeds look like chestnuts and will make you seriously ill. Black bean drops heavy pods holding two or three glossy brown seeds the size of a golf ball, and people ate them anyway: Aboriginal peoples along this coast sliced, leached and roasted them over several days to strip the toxins out. That is a great deal of work for a seed, which tells you what the return was worth. The tree stands on the northern edge of the rainforest section, 22 metres tall, its trunk a metre through and a little over three metres around. It is a legume, despite growing into a rainforest hardwood, and in spring the pea flowers open in orange and yellow racemes on the older wood rather than out at the tips. The species has one famous piece of joinery to its name. When the Speaker's Chair in the British House of Commons was destroyed in a 1941 air raid, the replacement Australia presented in 1951 was carved from black bean timber. Not from this tree. It went into the ground around 1944 and was roughly seven years old at the time, a decent sapling and no use whatsoever to a carver. The National Trust of Australia's significant tree register put it at about seventy years old when it was measured in February 2014, in good condition. That register is the only source we found naming this tree.