Decaisnea Fargesii (Blue Sausage Shrub, Dead Man's Fingers)

This is an amazing large shrub or small tree originally from eastern Asia to western China and growing slowly to around 4 metres x 4 metres. The bizarre fruits look like giant beans, wobbly and knobbly and clustered.

Sausages or fingers you decide but for me they are Alice’s caterpillars dangling lumpy and bumpy and velvet-shrouded in sleeping bags of the most startling Regency blue. Fantastical objects.

The seeds are not edible, but the sweet gelatinous pulp has a similar flavour to watermelon it is said

The fruits on this thing are so distracting that finding sensible adjectives for the rest of it is a struggle. We’ll just make a list and come back to it later.

Leaves: fresh salad-y green. Deciduous and graceful, delicately serrated and held in divided pairs about 30-40cm long. Each of these are held horizontally giving a dense and layered effect and the impression of multiple platforms and topographies. Fantastic light / shade contrast through the plant as a whole.

Stems: multi-stemmed and forming quite thick thicketty thickets, with all the mass of leaves puffing out from the sides and top.

Flowers: small racemes (botany lingo for ‘flower cluster’) produced in early summer and drooping pendulously. These are pleasantly fragrant and most pongy in the evening.

Fruit: we’ve done that bit. Bonkers, perfectly potty things. Magic beans. We’re in love.

Plant this large shrub in full to sun to partial shade, in any sheltered position on a moist but well drained soil. it is hardy in most winters, down to -10C but we’ll remind you again about the sheltered aspect part.

Wisley has some, naturally, where it is rather joylessly labelled ‘Blue bean shrub’. 

N.B. When clipping several plants with the same tool, have a bucket containing a 5% bleach solution and swish your blades around for 30 seconds between plants to sterilise them. This will help avoid the chance of cross contamination of disease.

As with all woody plants, plant high, exposing as much of the taper at the base of the trunk as possible. Allowing soil to accumulate round the base of a tree can be fatal. Keep very well watered when first planted.