Plants combat plants - cannons
    Plants & People

    Plants combat plants

    Nigel Chaffey
    July 14, 2010
    1 min read
    Plants combat plants - cannons
    source wikimedia

    Question: when is a cannon not a cannon? Answer: when it’s a ‘high-pressure long-range deodorant spray’(!). For such is the description of the cannons currently being deployed in China to combat the malodorous odours emanating from a Beijing rubbish dump (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8639248.stm). Over 100 of the odour-busting devices have been recruited to defend the city’s inhabitants from the offensive smells that issue forth from the Gaóantun landfill site. In a nice twist the offending odour – due in no small measure to decaying plant matter – is being neutralised by dousing with a spray made from… plant extracts. But, try as I might, I could not sniff out the precise formulation of this mixture for you.

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    Nigel Chaffey

    I am a botanist and former Senior Lecturer in Botany at Bath Spa University (Bath, near Bristol, UK). As News Editor for the Annals of Botany I contributed the monthly Plant Cuttings column to that august international botanical organ - and to Botany One - for almost 10 years. I am now a freelance plant science communicator and Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University. I continue to share my Cuttingsesque items - and appraisals of books with a plant focus - with a plant-curious audience. In that guise my main goal is to inform (hopefully, in an educational, and entertaining way) others about plants and plant-people interactions, and thereby improve humankind's botanical literacy. Happy to be contacted to discuss potential writing - or talking - projects and opportunities.
    [ORCID: 0000-0002-4231-9082]

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