British Wildlife is the leading natural history magazine in the UK, providing essential reading for both enthusiast and professional naturalists and wildlife conservationists. Published eight times a year, British Wildlife bridges the gap between popular writing and scientific literature through a combination of long-form articles, regular columns and reports, book reviews and letters.
Conservation Land Management (CLM) is a quarterly magazine that is widely regarded as essential reading for all who are involved in land management for nature conservation, across the British Isles. CLM includes long-form articles, events listings, publication reviews, new product information and updates, reports of conferences and letters.
This volume accompanies text volume 10 published in 2010.
This volume encompasses one large plant family, namely, the Fabaceae or Leguminosae, with 1673 species in China, of which 690 are endemic. The fruits come in the form of legumes, from the Latin word for pod. The green bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), chickpea (Cicer arietinum), and soybean (Glycine max) have legumes containing seeds, also called pulses, that are of great agricultural and economic value. Beans are a staple of traditional Chinese cuisine. Clover (Trifolium repens) and lucerne (Medicago sativa) are used around the world for feeding livestock; when ploughed into the soil they act as fertilizers because of the atmospheric nitrogen fixed by the nodules in their roots. Among the ornamentals from this family native to China, the golden shower tree (Cassia fistula) is from a genus that has long been known there. Around the early ninth century, poet Li Ho wrote of its rich fragrance and, a few decades later, poet P`i Jih-hsiu described dwarf cassias as sporting leaves "the size of fists."