50 YEARS OF BEAN BAGS

Colin Hughes (University of Zurich, Switzerland)

Co-founded in 1975 by Tom Elias, then Director of the Carey Arboretum at the New York Botanical Garden, Richard Cowan, curator at the US National Herbarium and Charles (Bob) Gunn, curator of the National Seed Herbarium, US Department of Agriculture, the Bean Bag reached 50 years old in 2025! The genesis of the Bean Bag occurred at an ad hoc meeting of legume taxonomists at the First International Congress of Systematics and Evolutionary Biology (Boulder, Colorado), when Tom Elias volunteered to produce a legume newsletter and distributed a questionnaire to potential readers worldwide. Cowan and Gunn assumed the editorial duties. They printed and distributed the first issue based on feedback from the questionnaires sent out by Elias. It was Mary Kalin Arroyo (then a postdoctoral fellow at the Missouri Botanical Garden) who suggested naming it the Bean Bag. Back in May 1975, when the first Issue of the Bean Bag was published, the founding editors probably were not thinking that the newsletter they had started would still be flourishing half a century later.

The Bean Bag was envisaged as a ‘highly diversified collection of news and notes of interest to leguminologists’ to promote communication among research scientists concerned with the systematics of the Leguminosae. Those aims and remit are still pretty much the same today. The core content has always been news from legume researchers–so called Gleanings–with updates on their research and offers / requests for research material, alongside a bibliography of recent legume literature. The initial joint editorship straddling herbarium taxonomy and more applied legume science reflected the broad focus of the Bean Bag, spanning new nodulation records and newly described species highlights, alongside the core News items, Gleanings from readers, and the bibliography. Latterly a gallery of leguminologists has been added, plus reports from the Legume Phylogeny Working Groups on taxonomy, traits, phylogeny, and geographic data.

Issue Number 1 of the Bean Bag was written on a type-writer, printed and distributed to 113 readers worldwide by post. Email distribution started in 1995 and continues nowadays to almost 500 readers. New issues are also made available on the Legume Data Portal and an archive of all 71 Bean Bags is available on the Kew Research Repository. Initially two issues were produced per year, then from 1996 the Bean Bag was produced as a single annual newsletter. Colour was introduced in 2012 and recent issues include rich sets of legume images as well as an Artist Spotlight. In 2020, a new layout was designed by Warren Cardinal-McTeague. The first 40 issues benefitted from financial support from the United States Department of Agriculture and the next 20 issues from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while latterly no financial support has been needed.

The longevity of the Bean Bag is testament to the continued buoyancy and vibrancy of legume systematics research over the last 50 years, the harmonious collaborative spirit of the global legume research community, and the tremendous, sustained and productive advances in legume systematics knowledge which that collaboration has fostered. Long may it continue!

Editors

1975–1981, Issues 1–13, Richard Cowan, U.S. National Herbarium, Smithsonian Institution, U.S.A. & Charles (Bob) Gunn, United States Department of Agriculture, U.S.A.

1981–1986, Issues 14–22, Charles (Bob) Gunn, United States Department of Agriculture, U.S.A. & James Lackey, U.S. National Herbarium, Smithsonian Institution, U.S.A.

1986, Issue 23, Charles (Bob) Gunn, United States Department of Agriculture, U.S.A.

1986–1992, Issues 24–35, Charles (Bob) Gunn & Joseph H. Kirkbride, Jr., United States Department of Agriculture, U.S.A.

1992–1994, Issues 36–39, Joseph H. Kirkbride, Jr., United States Department of Agriculture, U.S.A. & John H. Wiersema, Smithsonian Institution, U.S.A.

1994–1996, Issues 40–44, Joseph H. Kirkbride, Jr., United States Department of Agriculture, U.S.A., John H. Wiersema, Smithsonian Institution, U.S.A. & Roger M. Polhill, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, U.K.

1997–2010, Issues 45–58, Barbara Mackinder, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, U.K.

2012–2014, Issues 57–61, Lourdes Rico Arce, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, U.K.

2015–2019, Issues 62–66, Brigitte Marazzi, Natural History Museum of Canton Ticino, Switzerland.

2020–2021, Issues 67–68, Colin Hughes, University of Zurich, Switzerland & Warren Cardinal-McTeague, University of British Columbia, Canada.

2022–2023, Issues 69–70, Colin Hughes, University of Zurich, Switzerland, Warren Cardinal-McTeague, University of British Columbia, Canada & Leonardo Borges, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil

2024–present, Issues 71–72, Leonardo Borges, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil & Stephen Boatwright, University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Bean Bag covers across the years.