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Media Recommendation
"...a landmark series of volumes."
　　—— Economic Botany
"...a must for any student of the temperate and subtropical flora of such a vast, species-rich country..."
　　—— Kew Bulletin
"...an indispensable tool for identifying Chinese plants..."
　　——Systematic Botany

Editor's Recommendation
Flora of China,Wu Zhengyi and Peter H. Raven, co-chairs of the editorial committee. Hong Deyuan, vice co-chair of the editorial committee The Chinese flora, with an estimated 31,500 species,is of immense scientific and horticultural importance,Noteworthy, too, is Chinese traditional medicine,which is based on the remarkable plant resources of thecountry. Descriptions and identification keys for this diverse flora, until now unavailable in English, havebeen published over the past 18 years in the Flora of China, in conjunction with a separate series, the Floraof China Illustrations. Thirty-seven of the total of48 text and illustrations volumes have already beenpublished, thanks to an unprecedented and long-standing collaboration between Western and Chinese scientists.Volume 10 of the illustrations series encompasses onelarge plant family, namely, the Fabaceae or Leguminosae,with 1,673 species in China, of which 690 are endemic.The fruits come in the form of legumes, from the Latinword for pod. The green bean（Phaseolus vulgaris）,chickpea （Cicer arietinum）, and soybean（Glycine max）have legumes containing seeds, also called pulses, thatare of great agricultural and economic value. Beans area staple of traditional Chinese cuisine. Clover（Trifoliumrepens）and lucerne（Medicago sativa）are used aroundthe world for feeding livestock; when ploughed into thesoil they act as fertilizers because of the atmosphericnitrogen fixed by the nodules in their roots. Among theornamentals from this family native to China, the goldenshower tree （Cassia fistula）is from a genus that haslong been known there. Around the early ninth century,poet Li Ho wrote of its rich fragrance and, a fewdecades later, poet P i Jih-hsiu described dwarf cassiasas sporting leaves "the size of fists."