June'07 - Gardening News

 

News of Interest to Gardeners

The following is guaranteed totally free of any and all reference to Pars Hilton

Landscaping

·         A man out walking in the woods at Bad-Honnef, near Bonn, Germany stumbled on 98 dwarves in a clearing surrounding a figure of Snow White.

·         “If the house and location are desirable, buyers may look past this distraction, as plants can always be easily removed,” advises B.C. real estate appraiser Michael Martyn on an “over-developed garden” in a CanWest News article. Green thumbers should resist the temptation to dispose of surplus pesticides on such dispensers of moronic musings.

Lawns

• Grass plants capture and use greenhouse gases, thereby counteracting climate change. Turf also traps air pollution and generates much of the oxygen we breath. A 50- by 50-foot lawn produces enough oxygen for a family of four to breathe for one year, says Tony DiGiovanni in the trade publication Horticulture Review.
• Provincial turf specialist Pam Charbonneau would like you to know that Fusarium patch disease of lawns is now called Microdochium patch, which was active this spring thanks to the cool wet weather experienced.
• Charbonneau also reports that weed populations can be kept in check by proper fertilization. “Our research shows that simply fertilizing four times a year with a total of 2.0 kg of actual nitrogen per 100m² kept broadleaf weed populations down to 5 to 10 per cent weed cover after four years, she writes in the trade magazine Horticulture Review.

Trees

·         Willows on Toronto’s western waterfront have been reprieved after the proposed parking lot for the Palais Royale, approved by city council a year ago, was been moved to the median between east and west bound lanes of the adjacent Lakeshore Boulevard. There will even be 20 more trees added, notes environmental-minded local councillor Gord “Jurassic” Perks.

·         The remains of the oldest-known trees, dating back 385 million years, were known only from fossilized stumps discovered near Gilboa, New York. Now two fossils of the upper parts of the Eospermatoperia tree have been found, also near Gilboa. The leafless trees, estimated at about 8-metres tall, had branches looking like bottle brushes, scientists say. 

·         Manitoba’s only winery has commenced producing a limited quantity of birch wine, reports Amy Rosen in Maclean’s magazine. Made from the sap of forest Betula, it has met with the approval of wine experts elsewhere.

·         Melting permafrost is undermining the black spruce trees in northern Manitoba, writes Gabrielle Walker in the journal Nature. Once they “stood as straight and honest as pilgrims. Now an ever-increasing number of them loll about leaning like lager outs. The decline is not in the moral standards of Canadian vegetation, but in the shifting ground beneath their roots.”

·         Seoul, Korea’s oldest tree, an 840-year-old much-venerated ginkgo will be surrounded by a park, created by the tearing down of two apartment developments that have damaged its roots. The ginkgo is also visited by pregnant women who pray under its branches and nibble on the leaves to assure they give birth to boy babies.

Bamboo

·         Add to ornamental gardening plus thousands of other uses for bamboo – textiles. The silky fabric is highly absorbent and antibacterial, writes A. R. Williams in National Geographic. Last year China, the world’s biggest bamboo producer, exported US$10-million worth for textile manufacture, the magazine notes adding if trends continue it may someday compete with King Cotton.

Flowers

·         Yellows, blues and greens are named ‘Back to Nature’ by the Color Marketing Group, according to Susan M. Martin of Walters Gardens writing in The Epic Gardner magazine.

·         Amongst almost a dozen exception perennials recommended by Mark Denee, Corporate Horticulturist at The Epic Plant Company are Aquilegia canadensis, Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost,’ Baptisia australis and Hosta ‘Northern Exposure,’ along with Polygonatum, Nepeta and Sedum.

·         Would you believe taking a nosedive over a Tulip? Paula Abdul did just that, reportedly banging her pretty schnoz – except the Tulip is apparently one of her pet Chihuahuas.

• Splurge on real flowers, save on glass vases, advises Lynda Reeves in Post Homes, who also appears on Global TV. Unless it’s a Tiffany crystal beauty, she says, florists and department stores have great glass vases at bargain prices. It’s the shape and scale that counts.

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Wildflowers

·         Malmsbury’s municipal gardeners are unpopular. Apparently not all inhabitants of the Scepter’d Isle recognize the rare snake’s head fritillary. The now-rare bulbs were planted by volunteers, tended for seven month – only to be mown down by the Brit town’s uncivil servants.

Vegetables

·         “Heirloom Tomatoes Product of Canada 5.99/lb” proudly proclaimed a flyer from the Maritimes merchant Sobeys. “Uniquely beautiful,” it continued, “Classic first generation variety tomatoes ‘true type’ grown from seeds that are over 50 years old.” Oh my, must be a record for tomato seed longevity.

·         By the time you read this, Edith Branco will have completed 30 days on a steady diet of salad  . . . or perhaps not. Maclean’s reports that by day five she sounded “grumpy.” The 5-foot-7-inches, 195-pound Torontonian aimed to go from a size16 to 12 by summer participating in the ‘Lettuce Size Me’ challenge. Better still, lettuce pray.

• The weekly New Scientist ‘Feedback’ feature is a fertile field of information. A couple of years ago, it reported that, in the words of US trademark application number 74485223: “The mark consists of the exhaust sound of [the] applicant’s motorcycles, produced by V-Twin, common crankpin motorcycle engines when the goods are used . . . This is often described as ‘potato, potato, potato’ by motorcycle enthusiasts. Harley-Davidson believes that the sound of its engines has been a distinctive attribute of its motorcycles and therefore believes protection is necessary.” For reasons we’re not entirely clear about, says the magazine, the application was eventually abandoned.
• Pigeon peas are a legume crop almost unknown in the West but a critical cash crop in India, eastern Africa and the Caribbean. Finally it has been successfully hybridized with prospects of vastly increased yields, thanks to the dedication and lifetime work of K. B. Saxena, a scientist at International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Patancheru, India, reports Erik Stokstad in the journal Science.
• “Canada’s 3,555 certified organic farms . . . seem like good news. But the greatest portion of organic land is devoted to prairie grains destined for export to Europe,” writes Wayne Roberts in NOW magazine. “Sure, organic is the growth segment in food retail, but most of this, especially fruit and veg and processed goods, comes from California, so the premium prices go south.”

Fruit & Nuts

·         Blueberry juice isn’t just a good source of antioxidants but also manganese, according to research in Japan. While manganese is non-magnetic left along, when exposed to a strong magnetic field, such as that produced by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, that changes. Hence a shot of the juice prior to an MRI scan will assist in revealing your intestinal features to awaiting medicos.

·         Belgian anarchist artist Jan Bucquoy plants a flag bearing the image of a banana in the royal palace’s garden in a failed coup d’état. The fruit is also the name of his failed Banana Party.

·         The odour of ripe durian fruit has been compared to an open Rangoon sewer during a monsoon. It is banned from aircraft in its native southeast Asia, to the distress of many who, despite the odour, enjoy the mushy mess. Horticulturalists in Thailand, where 800,000 tonnes are sold every year, are now reported to be close to producing an odourless durian fruit.

·         The fruit of the marula tree, Sclerocarya birrea, is used to produce the liquor Amerula, drunk worldwide, notes New Scientist. In its native Africa it is also much favoured for beer making, wine and jam – and by the indigenous elephant population who cause considerable damage to the fruit-producing female trees.

Beverages, Herbs & Spices

·         Scientists and Australian beer maker Foster’s are teaming up to generate clean energy from brewery waste water by using sugar-consuming bacteria, reports the commuter paper 24 Hours. The microbial fuel cell at a Foster’s Group brewery near Brisbane produces electricity plus clean water from the waste.

·         The Dorset naga, a version of Bangladesh’s fiery naga morich, is one of three contenders in the race for the world’s hottest pepper, reports National Geographic magazine. Brit Agronomists Joy and Michael Michaud discovered the pepper in a Pakistani market an hour’s drive from their home in the English county of Dorset. It weighs in at 923,ooo Scoville heat units as against the jalapeño’s mere 23,000 SHU, writes Catherine L. Barker in the magazine.

·         Gathering herbs from the wilds of northeastern China carries a certain element of risk. A 25-year-old woman survived being attacked by a Siberian tiger.

Houseplants

·         Oriental cymbidiums have been valued in China since the time of Confucius, notes the journal Science. At a recent orchid show in Shaoxing, eastern China, a plant sold for about US$175,000 (Y1.35-million). The Chinese export (or smuggle out) many of their 1,200 native orchid species, notes Science, and few plant species are protected.

·         An African violet relative from Bahia, Brazil, Gloxinia macrophylla, collected only once in 1817 and described scientifically in 1823, has been rediscovered, William Wayt Thomas writes in the current issue of Natural History.

Seeds

·         The Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens in the U.K. has banked its billionth seed, says the weekly New Scientist. It is an African bamboo from Mali, Oxytenanthera abyssinica.

Weeds

·         Some people with allergies to ragweed will also be sensitive to Echinaceae, according to a naturopath interviewed by Elizabeth Bromstein for her NOW alternative magazine column.

·         Mary-Kate Olsen is due to co-star as a love interest in Showtime’s dark comedy Weeds. Any comment would be superfluous.

Fertilizer

·         Guano, phosphate-rich dried bird droppings, caused a war in the late 19^th-century, reminds Sean Currie of the National Post. Bolivia, Chile and Peru battled over poop-splattered islands in the Pacific. Bolivia lost all of its coastline to Chile in the fertilizer-fuelled conflict. Of course, there was an even more famous, if fictional loser to guano. Unmentioned by Currie, arch-villain Dr. No was buried under a pile of the stuff by James Bond but perhaps Sean was too busy watching Andrea Andress to remember.

Bugs and Other Thugs

·         The Alberta government is committing an emergency $50-million in an attempt to control the pine beetle which munched its way through an estimated three million provincial lodgepole and jack pines last year.

·         A recent explosion in GTA deer population with catastrophic results to some gardens has been joined by – bunnies. Experts are blaming a corresponding crash in predators, especially coyotes and foxes in recent years. Writing in the Toronto Star, Curtis Rush suggests a homemade repellent of Spanish onion, jalapeno pepper and cayenne pepper, boiled in water, strained and sprayed. Or check out recipes for lapin à la orange.

·         In southwest Saskatchewan, it is a ghastly plague of gophers stripping grazing grasses from field after field. “There’s room for all God’s creatures. There’s just too many of them right now,” CanWest News quotes a local rancher as saying.

·         “Trust termites more than Carmelites,” Maclean’s reports raucous residents of Grajal de Campos, Spain yelling as they protested over three 500-year-old icons that went missing from a local nunnery when the religious order vacated the termite-infested premises six months ago.

·         Thanks to re-emergence of the Asian long-horned beetle in the city, Toronto loses 2,400 trees rather than the 800 originally expected to require destroying thanks to pest originally delivered here courtesy of Chinese exporters. Still, this is less than those destroyed by local developers in the past few months or anticipated in the immediate future.

·         Left over wood ash from the winter fireplace can be sprinkled between rows of vegetables to deter slugs, according to Adria Vasil writing in NOW magazine, quoting advice from Montreal Botanic Garden.

·         Beehives may have been decimated by the mysterious ‘colony collapse’ [see below] in North America, but up to 20,000 bees were found in the engine of a Boeing 737 forced to land after running into a swarm en route from England to Portugal, ac cording to the Toronto Sun.

Tools & Equipment

·         “All our tools are blunt . . . the third option which I learned about in a gardening magazine, is to buy very inexpensive tools, use them for a season, then throw them out and buy new ones the following year,” writes Sandra Gotlieb in the Weekend Post. A gardener is recognized by the way he treats his tools was once a popular saying . . .

Fungi

·         Global warming has its benefits for British mycologists. According to Alan Gange of Royal Holloway, University of London, and his colleagues, who examined more than 300 native fungus species, the fall fruiting season has almost doubled in length, that of spring extended also and some species are fruiting in both seasons, reports the journal Science.

·         Beatrix Potter, author of the classic Peter Rabbit, became an astute student of algae and fungi while in her 20s, writes Keith Stewart Thomson in the current American Scientist. She took her studies to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew but, for a variety of reasons, gave up her efforts there – to science’s loss but to the advantage of children’s literature and conservation.

Pesticides

·         A retired British soldier has been awarded a medical pension almost 40 years after he was exposed to Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick, reports The Globe and Mail. This is the first time this has occurred outside of Canada and even here, to date, only six such settlements have been made, although 1,500 claims have been made.

·         The pesticide carbofuran, used commercially against grasshoppers, is believed responsible for the second year of dog poisonings in Regina’s famed Wascana Centre Park.

·         Bacillus thuringiensis is not a chemical, points out Toronto’s chief forester Richard Ubbens. “It’s a naturally occurring bacteria in the soil,” he says,  “so prevalent in the environment that if you eat a salad you are eating this bacteria at the same time.” Burp. Pardon.

·         The mysterious ‘colony collapse’ disorder that has destroyed about half the 2.5 million colonies of honeybees in the U.S. is being blamed by many scientists on sub-lethal doses of the common pesticide imidacloprid, according to the New York Times News Service. Imidacloprid is said to be “the most commonly used insecticide on the planet”

·         “Rachel Carson’s work both directly and indirectly created a climate of hysteria and misinformation about the impact of DDT” on human beings, according to a spokesman for U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (Republican, Ohio) after he blocked a plan to honour the controversial biologist on what would have been her 100^th birthday – the day after John Wayne reached a similar milestone.

For the Birds

·         “A pigeon can produce 25 pounds of poop a year, and since they remain loyal to the old place, the stuff mounts up,” writes David Mehegan in the The Boston Globe. He refers, of course, to the European rock pigeon, Columba livia, introduced into North America by a Frenchman concerned over comestibles, as is the French wont.

·         A nest-building osprey is blamed by Hydro One for a power outage in Douro, Ontario affecting almost a thousand customers.

·         U.K. law bans disturbing nesting birds. Unfortunately the same birds can cause damage to homes. Resourceful homeowners near Stirling, Scotland are reportedly discouraging the bothering birds by obtaining lion and tiger dung from a nearby safari park and applying it to the roofs of their dwellings.

·         Once thought extinct, the Sumatran ground cuckoo turned up very much alive earlier this year to a team from the Wildlife Conservation Society. Setting up camera traps in Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park, they received a second shock – pics of the equally rare rainforest dwelling Sumatran striped rabbit, reports the journal Science.

Gardeners

·         Plantaholic seems to be a new word coined by Sondra Gotlieb in her Weekend Post column for the Victoria Day weekend.

·         A live detonator is discovered by a couple raking out a load of gravel while gardening over the long weekend in Chatham, Ontario.

·         Seven per cent of Canadians share gardening and landscaping duties with professionals, according to a national survey by Evironics Research.

Gardening in the City

·         ‘Weed Pulling Naturally’ reads a sign seen on a local lawn. How else would a weed be pulled?

·         The organic veggie garden surrounding the building occupied by the University of Toronto’s Students’ Administrative Council, which for almost a decade invited passers by to help themselves to free food, is threatened as two groups tussle.

·         “A lot of people don’t like trees and see them as a nuisance,” claims Toronto’s deputy mayor and “tree advocate” Joe Pantalone. “They falsely believe that tree roots cause cracks in pipes or foundations. Roots will be dawn to pipes already cracked and leaking water,” Pantalone said, interviewed by NOW magazine’s Bernadette Zubrisky.

·         Toronto’s Mayor David “Dusty” Miller gives a big build-up for GoZero! Toronto to make the city the greenest, fight global warming, etc., etc., etc. Since his bungleaucrats have allowed developers to destroy literally thousands of trees in the past months, it is more like GroundZero! Toronto.

·         “Gardening is an activity, first and foremost, and to be a gardener is to take part in an active relationship with the natural world,” commences an editorial in the current issue of Horticulture.

Science and the Gardener

·         Greek archaeologists unearth a funeral urn in Argos containing ashes, bones and rare textiles along with pomegranate. Greeks – and others – have been buried with many things, but a fruit?

·         Many species of spiders’ blood fluoresces under ultraviolet light, according to research by Susan Masta of Portland State University and reported in Science News, an exciting subject for your next wine and cheese party.

·         Australian Lloyd Godson spends 13 days submerged in BioSub, breathing oxygen produced by algae soaked in his urine, records New Scientist magazine.

·         Australia’s red bulldog ants, Myrmecia gulosa, often lie in ambush near blossoms, waiting to prey on honey bees which they may snatch “clean out of the air” writes Mark W. Moffett in the May National Geographic magazine.

·         A 300-million-year-old fossilized forest is found in an Illinois coalmine covering 10,000 hectares, the largest yet discovered, according to The Daily Telegraph.

·         Finally researchers appear to have tracked down the elusive signal that tells plants when to flower. Two reports were published online by the journal Science, fingering the FT protein.

·         A dusting of pollen on cars and buildings makes it harder for police to find fingerprints left by thieves, crime experts have discovered, reports the journal Nature.

·         Fossil pollen and climate models suggest a messy world in 2100, writes Douglas Fox in the journal Science. Surviving species will reshuffle into entirely new combinations, creating ‘no-analog’ ecosystems in a similar manner to those that occurred behind the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet 17,000 to 12,000 years ago, he says.

·         Dr. Stanley L. Miller died at age 77 in California, reported an obituary in The New York Times. As a young graduate student in the early 1950s, his experiments demonstrated how amino acids, the building blocks of life, could have been initiated on the primitive planet from simple chemicals.

·         Much of what we learned in grade school about the New World encountered by the colonists at Jamestown is wrong, according to Charles C. Mann in an extensive article for National Geographic magazine. Their introduction of Caribbean tobacco, as opposed to the local rank plant caused drastic changes to the landscape – but even more so were the introduction non-native earthworms and honeybees. And the story of Pocahontas saving the life of John Rolfe is highly suspect – her real name was Matoaka, the other being no more than a nickname meaning ‘little hellion.’

Weather

·         An especially active storm season is forecast in the Atlantic, says the Associated Press, citing two U.S. hurricane experts. Where they the pair who predicted last years’ similarly active season, to the dismay of global warning enthusiasts when said failed to mature?

·         Global warming? Cremona, Alberta receives a heavy snowfall Victoria Day. It’s enough to make David Suzuki consider hara-kiri.

·         Inhabitants of northern Newfoundland, meanwhile, spend the entire Victoria Day weekend huddled without power as ice storms down hydro lines.

·         The great American drought that spawned the Dust Bowl of the 1930s may become the new climatic norm for much of southwestern North America, according to research published online in the journal Science from researchers at Columbia University, New York.

Travel

·         Planning to visit gardens this summer? Travel no further than Grey and Bruce where normally private gardens of this scenic area await you through to October. A donation of fee, usually $2 or $3, is all it costs. Included is the famed Larkwhistle Garden at Dyers Bay, near the head of the incredibly scenic Bruce Peninsular. Check www.ruralgardens.ca for details.

Kyoto Kafuffles

·         Tom Dueck of Plant Research International in Wageningen, the Netherlands and his colleagues say they can find no evidence that plants do in fact produce methane gas. The report “has cast doubt on one of the most startling research results the field has seen in recent years,” writes Michael Hopkin in the journal Nature.

·         The gaseous emissions of the bovine digestive tract accounts for more greenhouse gases than all the SUVs, airplanes, trucks and cars combined, writes Vasko Kohimayer in The American Thinker and quoted in Canada Free Press. The extraordinary thing is that this is according to the UN.

Genetic Modification

·         British scientists suggest sparing two rows of GM sugar beet in every hundred from spraying with herbicide to permit weeds to grow there and offer food for birds and mammals, according to the London-based New Scientist weekly.

·         Red faces for British activists, reports the journal Nature, when their meticulous plan to plant organic potatoes in a transgenic trial plot fell at the final hurdle – when the sabotaged the wrong field. 

·         The now-notorious Chinese wheat gluten came from “Chinese wheat [that] was genetically engineered or modified (GMO) and this is the source of the problem,” according to Michael Fox, B. Vet. Med., Ph.D., D.Sc., M.R.C.V.S, quoted by Judi McLeod of Canada Free Press.

·         A U.S. federal court extended the ban on planting of genetically engineered Roundup Ready alfalfa following a ruling earlier this year by U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco.

Environment

·         “Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn – which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year,” write C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

·         Jatropha curcas, whose oil was touted in the 1960s as a replacement for that from sperm whales to the Hollywood crowd and similar innocent souls, is back in the news again. This time, no less an authority than the monthly Scientific American headlines it ‘Green Gold in a Shrub,’ suggesting ‘entrepreneurs target the Jatropha plant as the next big biofuel.’

·         An old one, true, but recently re-emerged from an old New Scientist file: “What should you do if you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?”

·         “Trail bike enthusiasts think nothing of carting in chainsaws and cutting down mature trees to build ramps for their daredevil jumps,” reports Kyla Dixon-Muir in the weekly NOW. Eco-sensitive areas in Toronto’s Crowther Woods are the subject of her illustrated report, but we have seen serious degradation elsewhere.

·         New findings indicate today’s greenhouse gas levels not unusual, were the headlines on Newsletter@americasnewssource.com reporting on Canadians Dr. Tim Ball and Ron Harris. “‘Stopping climate change’ may be all the rage with celebrities and environmental lobbyists, but fortunately for the rest of us, the scare’s scientific foundation is rapidly disintegrating,” they say at www.nrsp.com

• Horticultural knowledge does not appear to be high at Time. Their ‘Global warming survival guide,’ notes the Feedback feature of New Scientist, suggests: “You could make your own clothes with a needle and thread using 100 per cent organic cotton sheared from sheep you raised on a wholefoods diet . . .”
• Municipal mayors in Canada are enacting real environmental change, says Sierra Legal, while federal and provincial politicians deliver nothing more than “green rhetoric.”
• Industrial strength deodorant sprays, smelling of vanilla creamsicle and blackberry, are being used to cover up the pong from the Charlottetown, P.E.I., sewage plant, reports the National Post.

Law and the Gardener

·         Scientists and not politicians will henceforth determine which threatened plant and animal species are annually added to Ontario’s Endangered Species Act after legislation updating it was passed by a vote of 64-5 in the provincial legislature.

·         You could get 30 days for pushing a wheelbarrow down the street in St. John’s, Newfoundland, notes CanWest News thanks to arcane regulations in the City of St. John’s Act. Doubtlessly we can now look forward to Toronto Councillor ‘Curious’ Georgio Mammoliti attempting to introduce similar legislation when not spending his time persecuting other councillors for not spending enough of their office allowance.

• A prominent philanthropist who donated millions to environmental and conservation causes is murdered in a Toronto underground parking garage. Glen Davis, 66, was shot below the building housing the local World Wildlife Fund offices. He was also an outstanding supporter of the Sierra Club of Canada. Police believe Davis was intentionally targeted.
• When a Dallas, Texas lawyer built a shed in his yard, his neighbour, an oilman, complained. The lawyer retaliated by moving in a donkey. Brought to court, with the donkey facing the jury as an exhibit, the pair settled their differences before a verdict was reached.

Business

·         Corn originated in Mexico but the country imports millions of tonnes every year from the U.S., where demand has escalated thanks to ethanol fuel production. Soaring corn prices have increased the price of tortillas so that the Mexican government has been forced to cap prices for the staple food of millions of Mexicans.

·         When Rebecca Rupp wrote of a blue corn cultivar some years ago she little knew that Mexican jean makers in Tehuacan would achieve the same thing – by polluting irrigation water. Residents say there are virtually no government controls, reports Reuters.

·         Aid bureaucracies are the only winners when they repackage outdated development projects into supposed carbon savers, writes Grainne Ryder in an article entitled ‘Carbon Boondoggles’ in the Financial Post.

·         China finally admits that two Chinese companies illegally exported rice and wheat gluten contaminated with melamine, a chemical used in fertilizer. At least 4,000 pet deaths have been reported out of 17,000 complaints to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

·         Vegetables raised locally under glass or plastic are increasingly appearing on dinner plates, reports Canada Press, reflect on an increasing appetitive for high-quality produce grown close to home, according to the news reports.

Health

·         “People seem to believe that ‘if it’s natural, it’s got to be good,’” writes Jane Brody in The New York Times on diet supplements.

• “We’ve been running the melamine feed business for about 15 years and receiving positive responses from our customers. Using the proper quantity of melamine will not harm the animals. Our products are very safe, for sure.” Wang Jianhui, manager of the Kaiyuan Protein Feed company, Shijiazhuang, China.
• “Medical researchers are not recommending it,” notes Maclean’s magazine, but a study of Parkinson’s patients family members who smoke tobacco have a lower incidence of the disease.

·         “Herbal companies will continue to advertise their ginkgo supplements with such watery, asterisked statements as, ‘May help support memory sharpness’,” writes Brendan I. Koerner in Slate.com. “Starbucks, of course could reasonably make the same claim,” he concludes.

·         Record levels of synthetic fragrances from everyday cleaning, deodorizing and beauty products have been found in the breast milk of American women, records the weekly New Scientist. Four decades ago a Canadian voiced concerns over DDT levels in similar situations, noting in his lectures that levels were so high that the milk would be banned if it were not for the attractive containers it came in.

·         Herbal supplements containing ginseng and ginkgo “don’t seem to alter how most prescription and over-the-counter drugs are absorbed in the body,” reports the commuter paper 24 Hours, without elaborating on that little word ‘most.’ It did, however, mention that studies of how much drug enters the body and how long it stays is known as  ‘pharmacokinetics.’

·         Joey Slinger writing in the Toronto Star comments that ginkgo biloba, as a memory aid, “was no better than tying a string around your finger, and probably not as good.” Amongst other hilarity, Slinger recalls that he used to take ginkgo biloba for memory . . .

·         A study of over 2,000 Americans claims that regular tea drinkers are less prone to the two principal forms of skin cancer.

·         Oil of oregano, goldenseal, myrrh, eucalyptus, licorice, horehound, thyme, garlic and mullein are all suggested as alternatives to antibiotics by “experts” quoted by Elizabeth Bromstein in her weekly alternative health column for NOW magazine.

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