Ooh, beans! I would love to grow beans/peas, and I seem to remember the ones we brought home from third grade science doing okay, but the books are very contradictory about how much sun various beans need. (Also the yard was sunnier when I was in third grade...)

I'm also seriously considering trying to steal some groundnut, which is pea family and native, and coaxing it to replace some of the English ivy.

..It is weird to think of zone 7 as being pretty hot, since we have a fairly long frost period! Though we're really at the most northerly tip of zone 7 by courtesy of being near water. And a lot of the references I've looked in say "part/full shade only in zone 6 and below" for all the fun plants, sigh...