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Have you considered any of the (traditional or modern) New Mexican chile varieties (all C. annum)?  There's still a fair amount of diversity in the traditional landrace chiles (generally named after the town/pueblo where the seeds were originally collected).  There is some color variation among the kinds, though mostly green->red (some darker with purples).  The modern improved varieties are bigger, more vigorous more uniformly fruited, etc., but they are also a little more picky about their environment.  The landrace chiles grow well with little/irregular water, generally don't exhibit blossom end rot, and tolerate poor soil.  They vary in elevation; the Jemez variety started around 7000', most of the other traditional varieties (Chimayo, Hernandez, Santo Domingo, Nambe) come from around 5500-6000'.  They travel well; my sister in Iowa grew some and they were bigger than anything that I could grow up in the mountains!  They tend to end up more mild in better soil with more rain, if that is a concern.

The modern varieties have their benefits as well.  There are varieties bred for color rather than flavor (yellows, oranges, purples).  They tend to be bigger plants and set bigger chiles.  I think at least one of the "traditional" named varieties likely has some commercial ancestry.  But, I find that in my own garden, the traditional varieties do well, and the modern varieties can be more hit-or-miss (some have done great, some have blossom end rot when the monsoons are in full force). 

I thought that the naming convention was actually (mother x pollen) (aka ladies first) but I might just be confused.  Either way it's just conventional.

As to why some individual varieties are better at crossing than others, I don't know every detail, but plants have some barriers in place to prevent inter-specific crosses (otherwise they might just be considered a single species).  In some cases, you can get a viable embryo but non-viable endosperm because some genetic combination is missing.  In that case, the seed will start to develop, but then stop, the pod will shrivel up and die.  If you catch that early enough you can excise the embryo and just grow it in growth medium (embryo rescue).  In other cases you won't even get a viable embryo due to genetic incompatibilities.  It comes down to finding the individuals that have the "right" combination of genes (which might mean a doubling of a gene or a missing gene or something controlling expression of genes...).

Again, others can speak to this who have more experience, but the rule of thumb seems to be that domesticated varieties have much higher barriers to crossing and wild plants tend to be more able to cross (likely due to the higher genetic diversity they have).

I suspect that what someone said about certain plants being "not true tepary" beans, they meant that they were a different species, and perhaps have this common name due to some similarity with P. acutifolius. 

I found this article: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-97121-6_4 which lists Phaseolus parvifolius as in the secondary genepool and a number of beans including common and runner in the tertiary genepool (one is called P. persistentus; the persistent bean?  Possibly a perennial?).  But, from the phylogenetic tree, the species you mentioned seem to be quite distantly related to the tepary bean.

To the first question: it's really hard for anyone to say it is not possible for two species to successfully interbreed, because sometimes crazy things happen in nature.  It looks like the three species you listed are more closely related to each other than to the tepary bean.  They are all in the same related group as P. polystachios, the thicket bean.

Academic researchers have successfully crossed tepary and common beans, but it required a number of interventions: first, only particular accessions were found to be compatible to crossing, second, embryo rescue was required (and if I remember correctly it really required a multi-step embryo rescue with different growth media for the different stages) and third, viability/fertility was only restored upon multiple generations of successive back-crossing.

To the second question: if the plants could cross breed, then it is possible that the perennial trait could be passed on.  Not sure if that would end up being lost if backcrossing was necessary.  It's hard to predict ahead of time.

To the third: others here can answer that better as I have never done it (yet), but it would generally involve emasculating a flower on the mother plant before it released its pollen and then manually pollinating the flower with mature anthers from the father plant.

Ultimately, I think you'd do better trying to cross more closely related species.  I haven't seen many papers trying to do runner x tepary, but I think it is established in the literature as possible (in both directions, also tepary x runner).  The runner is a perennial, so that could be a possible way to go.  Runners tend to prefer more wet/humid conditions compared to tepary which prefer more arid conditions, so the offspring could be interesting. 

Last year I found an odd bean plant in the garden. I didn't keep perfect track of what I planted where, but I suspect it was among the beans I held back and so from a two year old packet, and not the previous year's saved beans. It's also possible that I just forgot what I planted where. 

The packet was rattlesnake beans from NS/S. This plant, however had pink and white flowers rather than the purple typical of rattlesnake. The pods are green with pink(!) streaking rather than purple, but otherwise like rattlesnake in flavor, texture, shape etc.  The beans when dry were slightly darker than the rattlesnake beans; you'd likely have a hard time noticing it if I hadn't separated out this plant's beans.  The growth habit of this plant was also odd: it grew very tall (probably 10-12' before it died; it grew into the neighbor's lilacs), but it focused it's growth near the top.  The bottom leaves started dying back early but it kept on growing up making new leaves in a way quite atypical of the other ones around it.

I suspected they were some mystery hybrid, and once I got my senses about me and stopped eating them, I collected a handful of seeds to grow out this year hoping they're an F2 and would start segregating.  Much to my surprise all the pods look the same (pink on green), however the growth habit is different (4-6' plants so far this year, no dying back, vs 8-12' on the rattlesnakes). So, I'm not sure whether I have a hybrid on my hands or a mutation. It could be that the individual was already an F2 or later.  I'm attaching a picture of the pods next to typical rattlesnake pods; I could not find a flower out there today, but I could post a comparison once there is one.

I'm not sure if I've seen pink-streaks on a bean pod before, so I'm happy to encourage this trait.

Hi all and thanks for your thoughts.

Re: EFN; I definitely patronize them! I think the only species that I am growing this year that they aren't supplying at least some of the genetics of are the pumpkins and the chiles.

Southeast of ABQ is probably similar soil with perhaps more clay, but hotter and likely a little more dry. Being perched on the side of a mountain has its advantages in that sense. It's not quite as desolate as the moon, the more wild places are replete with natives (a few kinds of cacti, scrubby shrubs like chamisa and juniper, bigger piñon near water sources). But, when we don't have much rain, the sun seemed to bake all life out of the dirt and the wind kicks it up as fine dust.  When the plants are growing and the monsoons are strong, the soil takes on a more organic look, but wouldn't be mistaken for topsoil by a Midwesterner. It's quite shallow; bedrock is about 8 feet down.

Hello, my name is Chad Meyer.  I'm old enough to remember the USSR and the last time the Twins won the World Series, but barely.  I've been growing and experimenting on plants since middle school; my experiments on common beans won me a couple of science fairs back in the day. I grew up in Minnesota with a short-ish growing season, but plenty of rain and good soil. Now I live in northern New Mexico at 6300' with soil that has similar moisture levels and nutritional profile to lunar regolith. My garden proper is about 45'x4-5', so not a large area, but it stretches E-W and is along the north end of the lot, so I can put things like pole beans along the back and still have most of the space to work with.  I have a PhD in physics and work on software design for simulation modeling. I'm a lifelong learner and turn every hobby into an opportunity to study: I take as much joy in painting, cooking, gardening, woodworking, etc. as I do learning about the history, science, processes involved in each.  I've got four kids (ages 7 to 2 months), so plenty of help (or sometimes "help") for the garden.  We homeschool, and the garden is a surprisingly useful hands-on educational lab.  Growing oddball crops seems to run in the family as well; my grandfather always grew strange things in Minnesota and his father before him had as well.  I've heard stories of Minnesota okra and peanuts that they grew.

As I said, I've been gardening on and off (mostly on) for most of my life. Moving to the High Desert stretched my know-how, and a couple of years of near-total garden failures almost caused me to give up on gardening completely. Interestingly, the two things that spurred me on were that my wife told me that I wouldn't be able to do it, and that I happened to find a handful of beans one spring from a single plant that produced beans when I thought none had. Those got re-planted and performed much better than the other half envelope of beans I planted next to them. 

The pandemic catalyzed a shift my gardening habits. First, I couldn't buy either seeds or seed starting supplies, so I had to plant what I had: old, improperly stored half packets of various kinds, saved beans and seeds from the chiles hanging in my pantry. I also had to improvise, starting seeds on coffee filters and planting those in egg cartons. Second, working from home meant that I could watch my garden out the window all the time, and rather than wandering over to the proverbial water cooler, I wandered into the garden. This resulted in a greater awareness of the goings-on of the garden and interested me in learning more. I happened upon Joseph Lofthouse's series on landrace gardening and I was immediately hooked! I already grew my chiles that way but wanted to try the approach on all manner of growing things, so I planned out things I wanted to acquire/grow/try.

This year, I'm continuing to grow an increasingly diverse selection of snap pole beans, tepary beans, tomatoes, chiles, peanuts, okra, peas, squash, melons, cucumbers, pumpkins, corn and greens. Some things that I am growing are plants which I've tried with limited to no success in the past, because I love a challenge.  The beans are great and are the pride of my garden.  Tomatoes always do well; my "abuse" usually induces them to develop deep roots and not need any irrigation once the monsoons start.  This is the first year I've had enough confidence to not purchase any tomato starts at the hardware store as a hedge/backup. Chiles don't quite grow like weeds, but the kinds I grow are locals.  I've had poor results from the various cucurbits I've grown in the past. 

The okra is a tough one; I've never succeeded in growing that yet, and all my in-laws from more humid regions tell me it will be impossible.  I started with 3 packets including one I bought on a whim from the home improvement store rack which contained a few (otherwise unnamed) varieties.  Of 100 seeds planted in the ground, I think I got maybe 30 germinated.  Most of them are still stuck on their first set of true leaves (some haven't even sprouted their true leaves yet), but we'll see what happens.  I want to baby these just to prove everyone wrong!

My plans for the short-to-medium term future include: (1) diversifying some of my plants: I will likely need more okra genetics if I want them to reliably produce here; I'd like to add some bean varieties that are known to outcross more than average; since peanuts seem to be growing well, it would be nice to add in more of those as well; I am dissatisfied with the peas I've been growing, and would like to find varieties that climb high and make nice snap peas to form the basis of a new population (2) picking a cucurbit to focus on because I really don't have enough space to grow/trial/breed all of the kinds I stuck in the ground this year, (3) attempting a manual cross or a few; the beans could probably benefit the most but they are also the hardest; if the okra gets to that point, I'll try it there; the cucurbits would be easy, but see 2 above... and finally (4) trying to recruit any of my friends/colleagues/neighbors to grow along with me.