Journal articles on the topic 'Tea garden weeds'

Pteridophytes occupy a recognisable position in the flora of Terai and the hills of Darjiling. They are also well represented as weed in the Tea Gardens of this area. Recent survey recorded the occurrence of 86 species of pteridophytes from nine such gardens covering both Terai and Darjiling Hills. Of these, 25 species (30%), covering 21 genera and 20 families, are used by the Tea Garden workers in different manner like (i) 10 species as food, (ii) 02 species for fermenting traditional liquor, (iii) 01 species as fodder and (iv) 22 species as medicine for human diseases. In addition, some of these plants are used for basketry, playing carom, ceremonial decoration, ornamentals etc.

UAV may be limited by its flight height and camera resolution when aerial photography of a tea garden is carried out. The images of the tea garden contain trees and weeds whose vegetation information is similar to tea tree, which will affect tea tree extraction for further agricultural analysis. In order to obtain a high-definition large field-of-view tea garden image that contains tea tree targets, this paper (1) searches for the suture line based on the graph cut method in the image stitching technology; (2) improves the energy function to realize the image stitching of the tea garden; and (3) builds a feature vector to accurately extract tea tree vegetation information and remove unnecessary variables, such as trees and weeds. By comparing this with the manual extraction, the algorithm in this paper can effectively distinguish and eliminate most of the interference information. The IOU in a single mosaic image was more than 80% and the omissions account was 10%. The extraction results in accuracies that range from 84.91% to 93.82% at the different height levels (30 m, 60 m and 100 m height) of single images. Tea tree extraction accuracy rates in the mosaic images are 84.96% at a height of 30 m, and 79.94% at a height of 60 m.

AbstractFarmer training is important to improve weed management practices in tea cultivation. To explore the group characteristics of tea growers, we interviewed 354 growers in Guizhou Province, China. Sixty-one percent of the respondents planted tea for companies or cooperative groups, and 56% managed tea gardens larger than 10 ha. Self-employed tea growers tended to be older and smallholders, and to apply herbicides and conduct weed control less frequently (P < 0.05). Approximately 87% of the respondents conducted weed control two to four times yr−1, 83% spent between $200 and $2,000 ha−1 yr−1 for weed control, and 42% thought weed control costs would decrease by 5 years from this study. Twenty-eight species were mentioned by the respondents as being the most serious. According to canonical correspondence analysis, latitude, altitude, being self-employed or a member of a cooperative, having training experience in tea-garden weed management, and frequency and cost of weed control in tea gardens had significant (P < 0.05) influence on the composition of most troublesome weed species listed by respondents. Among the respondents, 60% had had farmer’s training on weed management in tea gardens. Of these, a significant number (P < 0.05) tended to think weed control costs would decrease, and a nonsignificant number (P > 0.05) tended to conduct weed control more frequently and have lower weed management costs in their tea gardens.

ObjectivesOccupational health is still in the developmental stage in Bangladesh. There is a lack of focus on agricultural workers. Statistics on musculoskeletal symptoms (MSS) of any occupational group can assist in developing intervention and ergonomics-based prevention. This study aimed to assess work-related MSS among tea garden workers.SettingThis cross-sectional study was done in one tea garden in Moulvibazar district which has the highest number of gardens in Bangladesh.Design and participants346 tea garden workers were interviewed using the Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire Extended Version 2. Workers 18–60 years of age and of both sexes were interviewed individually.Outcome measuresPrevalence of MSS among the tea garden workers, MSS in different body regions and MSS related informations. Sociodemographic and work-related factor associated with MSS.ResultsAmong the tea garden workers, 276 were female and 70 were male. The study showed 80.9% had symptoms in the past 12 months while 80.1% and 76.6% had in the past 4 weeks and on the day of the interview, respectively. Symptoms were most commonly reported at the shoulder (78.2%) followed by upper back (56.1%) and lower back (32.5%). Workers engaged with plucking operation were found to be significantly associated with symptoms compared with non-pluckers (p<0.05). Female workers were more likely to display symptoms in the neck (p<0.05) than male workers. Increased work hours were significantly associated with symptoms in the lower back (p<0.05). Overtime was responsible for symptoms in the elbow and hip/buttock (p<0.05). Statistics from relevant studies in India, Malaysia and Thailand were compared with the results of this study.ConclusionsThe prevalence of MSS among tea garden workers was found to be very high, and ergonomic interventions like reduction of weight load, job rotation and small breaks can reduce these symptoms.

Background: Globally diarrhoea remains the second leading cause of mortality among children of below five years age. Objective was to find out the prevalence of diarrhoea and child care practices associated with diarrhoea in under five children of tea garden workers of Jorhat district, Assam.Methods: A community based cross sectional study was conducted among the under five children of selected tea gardens of Jorhat district of Assam, India from July 2017 to June 2018.Results: Prevalence of diarrhoea among the study participants in last 2 weeks was found to be 26.4%. Out of 315 study participants, 24.1% belonged to the age group of 12-24 months, 55.2% were males. Exclusive breast feeding was recorded in 95.9% of the children. Prevalence of diarrhoea was less among exclusively breast fed children 25.5% as compared to not exclusively breastfed 46.1%. Health advice during diarrhea was sought by 97.8% of the respondents. Available records showed almost all of the children 99.3% got vaccinated with measles vaccine and contrary to this majority 64.4% study participants had not received Rota virus vaccination.Conclusions: Diarrhoea is still a significant public health problem among fewer than five children of tea garden workers with low Rota virus vaccine coverage. Our study findings recommends for the awareness building among the tea garden dwellers in regard to hand hygiene, timely initiation of complementary feeding, importance of vaccinating children with Rota virus vaccine as a part of containment programme.

Abstract: COVID-19 has had a significant impact on tea farmers all around the world, owing to national lockdowns and social distancing measures. The tea market is experiencing uncertainty as a result of export and import limitations, and growers are adopting emergency steps to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in tea communities. In March and April, India, the world's secondlargest tea grower, imposed tight lockdown measures that halted all agricultural activity for several weeks. Tea gardens and small tea growers have just resumed tea production and export, however the lockout has had a substantial impact on tea producers and smallholder livelihoods. This paper tries to examine the impact of COVID 19 on tea plantation sector in India.

Increased availability of toxic Al3+ is the main constraint limiting plant growth on acid soils. Plants adapted to acid soils, however, tolerate toxic Al3+, and some can accumulate Al in their aerial parts to a significant degree. Studies on Al-tolerant and Al-accumulating species have mainly focused on the vegetation of acid soils distributed as two global belts in the northern and southern hemispheres, while acid soils formed outside these regions have been largely neglected. The acid soils (pH 3.4–4.2) of the tea plantations in the south Caspian region of Northern Iran were surveyed over three seasons at two main locations. Aluminum and other mineral elements (including nutrients) were measured in 499 plant specimens representing 86 species from 43 families. Al accumulation exceeding the criterion for accumulator species (>1000 µg g−1 DW) was found in 36 species belonging to 23 families of herbaceous annual or perennial angiosperms, in addition to three bryophyte species. Besides Al, Fe accumulation (1026–5155 µg g−1 DW) was also observed in the accumulator species that exceeded the critical toxicity concentration, whereas no such accumulation was observed for Mn. The majority of analyzed accumulator plants (64%) were cosmopolitan or pluriregional species, with a considerable rate of Euro-Siberian elements (37%). Our findings, which may contribute to phylogenetic studies of Al accumulators, also suggest suitable accumulator and excluder species for the rehabilitation of acid-eroded soils and introduce new model species for investigating Al accumulation and exclusion mechanisms.

Mikania micrantha a gregarious perennial fast growing herbaceous creeping vine possess a serious threat to tea production. Negative impacts of the weed include labour cost, reduction in yield of crop, loss of native biodiversity etc. An ecological survey to study the seasonal distribution and economic impact in terms of cost and profitability of tea cultivation was carried out during 2004-2005 in two sites viz., Cinnamora Tea Estate (CTE), Division: Hatigarh and Experimental Garden for plantation crop (EGPC), Assam Agricultural University, Jorhat (Assam). The results of the present investigation showed highest population build-up 2600 and 1000 numbers of Mikania stalks/ha during the month of September and August respectively in CTE and AAU. Study on economic impact of Mikania showed an adverse effect of it on tea cultivation in the surveyed area causing a loss of 41.8% and 18.90 % respectively in CTE and EGPC.

Sudden food shortage due to strict green agriculture policy, economic crisis, COVID pandemic situation instruct the importance of home level organic production of good quality fruits and vegetables. Therefore, an experiment was conducted to test the efficacy of organic liquid fertilizers formulated from fish, livestock’s and plant wastes on leafy vegetable green Amaranth to promote home gardening. The liquid fertilizer was tested on Amaranth grown separately in vemicompost and garden compost. The 7 kg capacity pots were filled with two media (medium 1: vemicompost; medium 2: garden compost) and arranged in CRD with four replicates with each medium. Five plants of green-amaranth per pot were planted and treated with fish emulsion + vermi-tea (1:4=T1), cow urine + vermi-tea (1:4=T2), three leaves [Neem+ Giliricidia+ Candle bush] solution + vermi tea (3:1=T3), vermi tea (T4) and control (T5) at the rate of 50 mL/pot on 2nd, 4th and 6th week after planting. Agronomic and yield data were collected and subjected to ANOVA using SAS. Tukey's HSD multiple comparison test and PROC CORR was used to determine the best treatment combination at P <0.05. The results revealed that there was significant difference in N, P and K content of the treatments tested. The plant height, leaf area, number of leaves, root shoot ratio was significantly higher in fish emulsion + vermi-tea (1:4) [T1] and cow urine + vermi-tea [T2] at 8th weeks after planting in vermi-compost medium. There was strong and positive correlation (R2 > 0.8) among yield parameters, and root: shoot ratio with N, P K content of the liquid fertilizers tested in vermi-compost medium. Therefore, this investigation concludes that the fish emulsion + vermi-tea (1:4) and cow urine + vermi-tea (1:4) are good combination to use as liquid fertilizer at the rate of 50mL/Pot to get best yield in vermi-compost medium.

The adverse effects of chemical pesticides have continued to drive the search for safe, biological alternatives. Studies on biopesticide potential of earthworm casts have remained largely limited to those of temperate earthworms. We evaluated the insect pest repellency and growth-promoting potential of tropical earthworm-derived vermicast tea on the seedlings of Arachis hypogaea (groundnut), Zea mays (maize) and Phaseolus vulgaris (bean). Field-sourced earthworm casts were soaked in water for 48 hours, routinely stirred every 6 hours, and filtered through a fine mesh cloth. The filtrate was the vermicast tea. Seedlings grown in garden soil were sprayed with vermicast tea every four days. The seedlings were monitored for insect pest-induced leaf damage and growth performance for 5 weeks. Vermicast tea exhibited insect pest repellency effect on groundnut and bean seedlings, as evidenced by the significantly lower (p<0.01) insect pest attack on the treated seedlings, as against the untreated that recorded high pest infestations. However, leaf damage was relatively low in maize seedlings, and the differences in percentage leaf damage among the treated and untreated were not significant (p>0.05). The effect of vermicast tea on the physical growth of seedlings was positive, but marginal. This result calls for increased research on tropical earthworms.

Abstract Roses frequently occur in gardens and landscapes and may require weed management. Herbicide trials were conducted with 10 herbicides applied at label rates to plots containing a hybrid tea rose cultivar. The primary objective was to evaluate injury to rose plants when herbicides were sprayed over-the-top at two stages of growth: bud break and full leaf. A secondary objective was to evaluate the efficacy of the herbicides. The soil residual (pre-emergent) herbicides Devrinol (napropamide), Goal (oxyfluorfen) and the dinitroaniline herbicides Surflan (oryzalin), Treflan (trifluralin) and Prowl (pendimethalin) did not injure roses when applied at bud break. The herbicides Ornamec (fluazifop-p-butyl), Poast (sethoxy dim) and Envoy (clethodim), which have post-emergent activity, also did not injure roses when applied to roses at bud break or when applied in late spring when plants had fully developed leaves. Roses oversprayed at bud break with the herbicides Roundup (glyphosate) and Trimec Classic (2,4-D + MCPA + dicamba) did not show phytotoxicity symptoms immediately after application but had significantly shorter shoots beginning six weeks after treatment (WAT). Roses with fully developed leaves which were oversprayed with Roundup and Trimec Classic did show symptoms of injury one WAT and thereafter.

Teak (Tectona grandis L.f.) is one of the most valuable timber species, and is cultivated in agroforestry systems in many countries across the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The species is also one of the most essential trees in home gardens in South Asia due to its wood quality and medicinal value in folk remedies. It is a deciduous tree species, and the amount of litter that falls from teak trees is huge. The decomposition rate of the litter is relatively fast in tropical humid conditions. The interactions between teak and weeds, or crops, under the teak trees have been evaluated in terms of allelopathy. Evidence of allelopathy is documented in the literature over the decades. The leachate and extracts of teak leaves suppress the germination and growth of several other plant species. Phytotoxic substances, such as phenolics, benzofurans, quinones, terpens, apocarotenoids and phenylpropanoids, in the teak leaves, were isolated and identified. Some phytotoxic substances may be released into the soil under teak trees from leaf leachate and the decomposition of the litters, which accumulate by annual leaf fall and can affect the germination and growth of undergrowth plant species as allelopathic substances. The allelopathy of teak is potentially useful for weed management options in agroforestry and other agriculture systems to reduce commercial herbicide dependency. It was also reported that agroforestry systems with teak enhance income through the production of crops and woods, and provide energy efficiency for crop cultivation.

The efficacy of using potting media and fertilizers that are alternatives to conventional materials to produce vegetable transplants needs clarification. Bell pepper, onion and watermelon seed were sown in Container Mix, Lawn and Garden Soil, and Potting Soil, which can be used for organic production in greenhouse transplant production. The alternative media were amended with a 1× rate of Sea Tea liquid fertilizer. Comparisons were made to a system using a conventional potting medium, Reddi-Earth, fertilized with a half-strength (0.5×) rate of a soluble synthetic fertilizer (Peters). Watermelon, bell pepper and onion seedlings were lifted at 3, 6, and 8 weeks, respectively, and heights and dry weights determined. Watermelon were sufficiently vigorous for transplanting regardless of which medium and fertilizer was used. Bell pepper and onion at the scheduled lifting were sufficiently vigorous only if produced with conventional materials. Additional experiments were designed to determine the reason(s) for the weaker seedlings when the alternative products were used. Seedlings maintained in transplant trays, in which media amended weekly with Sea Tea were required to be held for up to an additional 34 days before being vigorous enough for transplanting. Six-week-old bell pepper, or 8-week-old onion, seedlings were transferred to Reddi-Earth in pots and supplied with Sea Tea or Peters fertilizer. Bell pepper treated with Peters were taller and heavier, but onions plants were similar in height and weight regardless of fertilizer used. Other pepper seed were planted in Reddi-Earth and fertilized weekly with Sea Tea at 0.5×, 1×, 2×, or 4× the recommended rate, or the 0.5× rate of Peters. There was a positive linear relationship between seedling height and dry weight for seedlings treated with increasing rates of Sea Tea. Other pepper seed were planted in to Potting Soil, or an organically certified potting medium (Sunshine), and fertilized with a 2× or 4× rate of Sea Tea or a 1×, 2×, or 4× rate of an organic fertilizer (Rocket Fuel), or in Reddi-Earth fertilized with a 0.5× rate of Peters. There was a positive linear relationship between the rate of Rocket Fuel and heights and dry weights of bell pepper seedlings. However, even at the highest rate seedlings were not equivalent to those produced with conventional practices. Plants treated with the 4× rate of Sea Tea were similar to those produced using conventional materials. Use of Sunshine potting medium and the 4× rate of Sea Tea will produce bell pepper seedlings equivalent in height and dry weight to those produced using conventional materials. The 4× rate of Rocket Fuel used in Sunshine potting medium will produce adequate bell pepper seedlings. The original poor showing of seedlings in the alternative potting media appears to be due to fertilization with Sea Tea at a rate that does not adequately support seedling development.

Bergenia crassifolia (L.) Fritsch (elephant's ears or Siberian tea) (Saxifragaceae) is a perennial rhizomatous plant with pink flowers appearing at the end of winter. Since 1990, large, brown, and necrotic spots have been observed on numerous B. crassifolia plants at the University of Sciences in Nice, France. Spots appeared each year in the spring on newly emerged leaves and enlarged up to 1 to 3 cm in diameter during the summer, sometimes affecting more than half of the leaf surface. Leaves with spots were collected from May to November and placed in a humid atmosphere. Black, sessile, discoid conidiomata developed on the spots and exuded a pink, then brown, spore mass. When a mass was transferred onto a 1% malt agar medium, mycelium grew and then numerous, relatively spherical conidiomata (0.5 to 2.5 mm in diameter) developed and exuded a pink slimy mass, which contained many conidia. The mycelium grown at 24°C in the dark was scarce and pale, pink-beige. Under the light, the fungal culture was much darker with a fluffy mycelium and numerous conidiomata. The base of the conidiomata was dark; conidiophores were hyaline and showed little segmentation. Unicellular, cylindrical, fusiform conidia were hyaline, 5.4 to 8 μm long, and 1.4 to 1.9 μm wide. The morphology and size of conidia were comparable with previous descriptions of Pilidium concavum (Desm.) Höhn. (2,3). The ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 region of two isolates was amplified by PCR with primers PN3 and PN10 according to Mendes-Pereira et al. (1) and sequenced. The 421-nt sequence (GenBank Accession No. FM211810) was 100% identical to that of the P. concavum specimen voucher BPI 1107275 (GenBank Accession No. AY487094). P. concavum was reported to be on stored or rotting leaves or fruits of many dicotyledonous plants (2). To validate Koch's postulates, pieces of mycelium cultures with conidiomata (28 days old) were placed onto the upper surface of leaves of healthy B. crassifolia plants (10 to 12 pieces per plant). The leaf epidermis was previously wounded with a needle and a drop of melted paraffin was poured onto each piece of mycelium to prevent desiccation. Agar plugs without the fungus were placed similarly on wounded leaves of two control plants. Four inoculated and two control plants were incubated in growth chambers at either 24 or 18°C (16 h of light per day, 15,000 lx, 80% humidity). At 24°C, brown spots developed from 90% of the inoculation sites, whereas spots were observed for only 18% of the sites at 18°C. Such spots did not develop on control plants. After 2 months, healthy leaves as well as those with necrotic spots were put in humid chambers. Conidiomata formed after 4 weeks and exuded the same pink mass, which contained numerous conidia and from which the fungus was reisolated. Similar symptoms were also observed in several other locations in France and in botanical gardens in Akureyri (Iceland) and Métis (Canada), from which P. concavum was reisolated. To our knowledge, this is the first report of P. concavum on B. crassifolia. References: (1) E. Mendes-Pereira et al. Mycol. Res. 107:1287, 2003. (2) M. E. Palm. Mycologia 83:787, 1991. (3) A. Y. Rossman et al. Mycol. Prog. 3:275, 2004.

Coprosma repens A. Rich. (mirror bush, Rubiaceae) is a hardy salt tolerant shrub that is native to New Zealand where it is primarily a coastal weed. In temperate climates, many variegated varieties and hybrids of mirror bush grow extensively in gardens. In February 2007, irregular or semicircular necrotic spots, sometimes in concentric rings, were noticed on leaves of approximately 2,000 potted, 1-year-old plants of C. repens ‘Tapuata Gold’ obtained as cuttings from a nursery located in Catania Province. The symptoms were detected on approximately 60% of the plants and were localized exclusively on older leaves especially in the yellow or white border. Protein A sandwich (PAS)-ELISA showed mirror bush was positive for the Batavian lettuce strain of Tomato spotted wilt virus (antiserum to TSWV: PVAS-450 from American Type Culture Collection, Manassas, VA). Double antibody sandwich (DAS)-ELISA with polyclonal antisera to Cucumber mosaic virus, TSWV, and Impatiens necrotic spot virus confirmed the presence of only TSWV. Reverse transcription (RT)-PCR was employed to characterize the TSWV isolate. RT-PCR was carried out with primers (forward 5′-TTA ACT TAC AGC TGC TTT-3′ and reverse 5′-CAA AGC ATA TAA GAA CTT-3′) specific for the CP gene of TSWV (3). Amplification was performed in a thermal cycler (Gene Amp PCR System 24000; Perkin Elmer, Hayward, CA) by preheating at 94°C for 5 min followed by 30 cycles of 1.5 min of denaturation at 94°C, 2 min of annealing at 48°C, and 1 min for extension at 72°C. Finally, the amplified DNA was incubated at 72°C for 7 min for a final extension. All samples yielded DNA fragments of the expected size of 823 bp, which included the entire N gene. Purified PCR products were cloned and sequencing (GenBank Accession No. EU020104) was done by Sequiserve (Vatterstetten, Germany). Comparison with sequences available from the GenBank database showed 96 to 99% homology with the same region of the genome for all TSWV isolates, thus confirming the identity of the virus as an isolate of TSWV. In the Rubiaceae family, TSWV was previously detected on Galium spp., Ixora spp., Gardenia jasminoides Ellis, and Bouvardia sp. (1,2,4). To our knowledge, this is the first occurrence of this virus on a member of the genus Coprosma. The high incidence of the disease in the nursery could be due to propagation of cuttings from an infected source. References: (1) M. K. Hausbeck et al. Plant Dis. 76:795, 1992. (2) C. Jordá et al. Plant Dis. 79:358, 1995. (3) R. A. Mumford et al. J. Virol. Methods 46:303, 1994. (4) A. M. Vaira et al. Plant Pathol. 42:530,1993.

A research to determine the effectiveness of lamtoro leaf extract on the growth of weeds in young tea plan­tation was carried out in Pasir Sarongge Experimental Garden and Plant Pro­tec­tion Laboratory RITC Gambung from June to December 2009. Researches on the effective­ness of lamtoro leaf extracts on the germination of weed’s seed, and on the growth of weeds in the field, were conducted. Lamtoro leaf extract treat­­ment at various concentrations tried, suppressed the germination of seeds of broad­leaf weeds (hareuga and babadotan) in the laboratory. In general, the germination supp­ression were increases with increasing the concentration of the extracts tested. Spraying of lamtoro leaf extract (Leucaena sp.) starting at concentration of 7.50% resul­ted better control effect and significantly different compared to controls. In addition, spraying treatment of lamtoro leaf extract could reduce the number of weed species.

The role of insects (arthropods) in human life can affect the yield and quality of agricultural products. Insect pests are insects that regularly or occasionally cause damage that can reduce the yield or quality of agricultural products. The purpose of this study was to determine the preference of arthropods on wild plants, to compare the percentage of interest and time orientation of arthropods on wild plants. This research is a qualitative descriptive that tries to reveal and explain about the preferences or interests arthro in Poda against wild plants (weeds) Cambodgien Wonosari Tea Garden Area, Singosari Malang. The difference in the percentage interest in insects against wild plants affected by volatile compounds secreted by wild plants. Overall plant contain volatile compounds produced by the leaves, flowers or fruit of the wild plants cause differences insect attraction. Insects itself able to select and respond to volatile compounds from plants that are in nature can be visited.

Introduction: Despite efforts to motivate all reproductive age women to avail cervical cancer screening services, many still do not utilise them. Most researchers have universally identified barriers like the lack of knowledge and lack of accessibility as the reason for not availing services. However, additional barriers also prevent women from making use of these screening services. Aim: To explore the barriers to and facilitating factors for cervical cancer screening beyond the lack of knowledge and accessibility of services. Materials and Methods: This qualitative research was conducted among tribal women residing in the Kiranchandra Tea Estate and Atal Tea Estate (two tea gardens in the rural Naxalbari Block) West Bengal, India, from July 2018 to February 2019. Women aged 30-59 years, living in the garden for at least the last 5 years, not suffering from obstetrics/gynaecological disease during last two years and willing to participate in the study were included, based on a purposive sampling method. Information Education Campaign (IEC) on cervical cancer and screening were undertaken and screening services arranged in the gardens on garden holidays for two consecutive weeks. Four (4) Focus Group Discussion (FGDs) in each garden were conducted, with each FGD consisting of 5 to 6 participants (N=49). Data obtained was recorded and logged with the participants’ permission and consent. A manifest content analysis was used to explore the perceived barriers and facilitators of cervical screening. Results: The major barriers identified were lack of support, burden of responsibility and the lack of felt need. The facilitators found most frequently were provision of information, social motivation, easy accessibility and affordability of screening services. Conclusion: This study revealed that there are various actual and perceived barriers to cervical cancer screening among tribal women in tea garden areas. Even after imparting knowledge and increasing availably and accessibility of a free program, familial support, burden of responsibility and lack of felt needs hinder increased uptake of the services.

For the weed control of Japanese yams, farmers pull out the vines by hand because the chemical control of Japanese yams in tea plantations is difficult as the vines grow from the area below the tea trees, where the herbicides have limited reach. This study compared the regeneration and growth of vines after controlling weeds using the following methods: 1) cutting the vine at 30 cm height, 2) cutting the vine at ground level, and 3) pulling out the vine from the base (at the node of the tuber and vine). All three treatments were performed during three weeding seasons to determine the most effective method and time to control Japanese yams in tea gardens. In addition, we investigated the deterioration of old tubers and the formation of new tubers by studying their weight changes because each old tuber disappears and forms a new tuber each year. However, our results indicated that new tubers were formed before the disappearance of old tubers, and there were no border time periods where both old and new tubers were absent. Furthermore, the new tubers grew in a short period from July to August. Therefore, we recommend repeatedly pulling out Japanese yam vines during July for effective weed control. Moreover, when vines of Japanese yam were not pulled out completely or were cut in May or July, branches grew rapidly and reached the canopy of tea trees after 2–4 weeks. Furthermore, when vines were pulled out at the ground level, 40 % of vines reached the canopy after one month. Therefore, it is difficult to control Japanese yam completely by pulling out vines alone.

The experiment was conducted at Greenhouse and experimental garden of Polytechnic LPP Yogyakarta in Wedomartani from March to June 2016. This study aims to know the difference of frequency influence of watering liquid green tea fermentation on the initial growth of rubber plant seedlings. This research use non factorial Random Complete Block Design (RCBD) method, that is fermentation of liquid waste of green tea with 10 ml / polybag dosage with 3 treatments. The treatment given was control (P0), watering 2 weeks (P2), watering 4 weeks (P4). The giving of liquid organic fertilizer from waste liquid fermented green tea can enhance plant growth include rubber, i.e. plant height, number of leaves, green leaves, heavy wet and dry long & root plant rubber. At the 2 week watering frequency treatments showed the best results than the control treatment and the frequency of watering once every 4 weeks. Keywords: fermentation, tea liquid waste, liquid organic fertilize

Study on the control of penny fern in tea through pruning and herbicides was con­duct­ed in Pasir Sarongge Experimental Garden, 1.100 m asl from August to November 2010. Experimental design used was split plot design, consisted of three main plots and six subplots. The main plot (pruning height) consisted of (A) 40 cm pruning height, (B) 55 cm pruning height, and (C) 70 cm pruning height. The subplot (method of weed control), consisted of: (1) glyphosate herbicide at 6 liters/ha, (2) paraquat dichloride herbicide, at 4 liters/ha, (3) 2,4-D herbicide, at 3-3 liters/ha, (4) a com­bination of glyphosate herbicide + 2,4-D at 6 liters/ha, (5) a combination of glyphosate and picloram herbicides, at 4 liters/ha, and (6) manual con­trol of the fern. The total treatment combination was 18 treatments. Each treatment was repeated twice. Observations were made on weed biomass and the growth of tea plants. Weed biomass were observed 3 times with 2-weeks interval, starting at 2 weeks after treatment of weed control.  The growth of tea plants was observed trought the number of primary shoots. The results showed that the 40 cm as well as 55 cm pruning height were provided better effectivity compared to 70 cm pruning height. At the third observation, the effectiveness of manual control was similar to the treatment of chemical control, except the treatment of single 2,4-D. The number of primary shoots grew on bush after 70 cm pruning height were higher and significantly different compared to the 40 cm pruning height as well as 55 cm pruning height. In every observations, the highest number of primary shoots per bush were consistently obtained from the treatment of combination of glyphosate and 2,4-D herbicides.

Many workers in global supply chains remain nutritionally vulnerable despite the income they earn. The Seeds of Prosperity (SOP) program was implemented in Tamil Nadu and Assam, India, for tea supply chain workers (estate workers, small holder farmers, and farmer workers). The aim was to enhance demand for diverse and nutritious foods, and improve practices related to handwashing. The program used a behavior change communication approach wherein participants received weekly 1-hour group sessions with messaging on dietary diversity for 5 weeks and handwashing for 4 weeks. An impact evaluation was conducted to estimate changes in reported dietary and hygiene knowledge and behaviors among women. The study used a longitudinal quasiexperimental design in a subsample of program participants at baseline and postintervention among both intervention and comparison. There was a small but significant increase in mean dietary diversity (DD) for all 4 worker groups (ranging from DD score changes of 0.3 to 0.7; P < .05) and in the proportion of women meeting the minimum dietary diversity in 2 of the 4 groups. Similarly, a significant increase in the mean number of handwashing moments was observed in 2 of the worker groups. An increase in home garden use was observed in 1 of the 4 worker groups. While the SOP program resulted in improvements in dietary diversity, most tea farming women still do not achieve minimum dietary diversity. Nutritious food access may be an important constraint to further improvement.

Edith and John Power were a wealthy expatriate Australian couple who lived in England and Europe from the early years of the 20th century until their deaths. In 1915 John Power married Edith Lee in London before serving as a surgeon on the Western Front in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After the war Edith and John left Britain to live in Paris and Brussels in the centre of a large international group of avant-garde artists. Edith, who was twelve years older than her husband, and had been married twice before (once widowed and once divorced), was to all accounts the driving force behind John's success as an artist -- he exhibited alongside Picasso, Braque and Kandinsky -- and the great love of his life. The following comes from a book-length fictionalised biography of their lives, narrated by Edith in the early 1960s when she was ninety-two years old. This extract comes from the part of the manuscript dealing with the Nazi Occupation of the Channel Island of Jersey in the second world war; the 'safe haven' to which the Powers had fled in 1938 when war threatened. The first winter under the Germans was very hard and there were reports of old people dying of starvation and exposure. Jack had terrible chilblains and we were both very thin. Cooking fat was only available for doctors to give to invalids, and one poor chap was so desperate that he used sump oil from his car to fry up some gull eggs, and poisoned himself. Sitting down to a plate of boiled potatoes I couldn't sometimes help but reminisce about the wonderful meals we had eaten in Paris and Brussels. How decadent they seemed -- oysters, poached salmon, grilled tournedos with asparagus or a roasted duck, then a glass of champagne, a slice or two of Ange à Cheval and some wild strawberries to finish off with. I also realised how petty all our worries had been up 'til then. We would be upset if the hotel we fancied was booked out for the summer, the bath water cold or a soufflé heavy. When the stock market dropped a point or two we were devastated, and Jack used to sulk for days when he had trouble with a painting or if his frames were not exactly as ordered, the moulding wrong, the gilding scratched or too bright. Such concerns seemed absurd when we faced death every day and misery and fear were all around us. Then the prisoners-of-war arrived from Russia, dressed in rags and even thinner than us. They suffered terribly, working impossibly hard every day on the railway and underground hospital, with nowhere proper to sleep and very little to eat. We felt so sorry for them, and admired those Islanders who, although it was a serious crime, sheltered them if they managed to escape. We had another dreadful reminder of just how awful the Germans could be when they started shooting anyone caught with a crystal radio set. By the summer of 1942 Jack was very ill, although he continued to deny anything was wrong. He finally confided in me just how dire things were one afternoon when we were sitting on the terrace. We were drinking the last of our English tea and discussing how wild the garden had become. One minute Jack was saying how much he enjoyed watching everything return to its natural state, the next he was telling me that he thought he had a cancerous tumour in his kidneys and should see a doctor. I listened in a daze as he detailed the possible treatments and his prognosis, which he anticipated to be poor. Then he stood, drank the dregs in his cup, kissed me and said he had to return to the studio. He had salvaged a piece of wood from somewhere to paint on and didn't want to lose the last light. I was stunned, not wanting to believe what he had told me. I never found out whether Jack suspected the cancer before the Occupation, but if he did, I can't understand why he didn't tell me. We could have gone back to England or over to Switzerland and seen the best doctors. This still puzzles me for Jack was never reticent to seek medical treatment. Tony even laughingly called Jack a hypochondriac, he was so careful with his health, but then again, I know Jack's father had hidden the same condition from his family some forty years before. For many years after the war Ceylon tea only ever tasted of trouble and dismay to me. Nowadays everyone wants to give me tea all the time, especially the nurses. I tell them I'd really like a stiff gin and tonic, but alcohol is another of life's pleasures denied to the elderly. If I could only get out of this bed, I'd get one for myself -- a big one. I have forgotten the name of that doctor we consulted a few days later, but I remember exactly what he said. He confirmed what Jack thought, that the tumours were in his kidneys, but added that they had possibly settled in his lungs as well. In a last (but futile) effort, my poor darling was operated on by this old fashioned surgeon who had to work in the most primitive conditions; without the drugs, anaesthetics or antiseptics he needed. By that time it was difficult to find soap whatever price you were willing to pay, and I gave him some fancy little rose scented tablets to wash up with before he cut Jack open. Jack had never been a fast healer and all the odds were against him; the strain of the advancing cancer, the inadequacy of our diet and the lack of proper medicines. The only foods we could obtain were quite coarse, there was no lean meat to make beef tea or eggs for milk puddings. Jack once said to me something to the effect that the ghastly jokes of fate are not always in the best of taste but they could be extremely witty. I never, however, found anything except the most savage cruelty in his situation, that such a highly trained surgeon had to endure such a crude assault on his body, and that a wealthy philanthropist could suffer so for the want of the most basic requirements of food, firewood and pain killers. My darling, who had been so dreadful when struck down with the slightest illness, was a model patient. It took a long time, but eventually he was able to leave his bed, and the first thing he did was to boil up his own analgesics, potent narcotics which he followed with a stiff whisky. When his condition deteriorated and I had to tend to all his most intimate needs, he was always good tempered and never made me feel I was humiliating or demeaning him. We grew closer than ever, but I knew our time was running out. In another cruel twist of fate Jack was only exempted from deportation to a German internment camp by the sick certificate. An order of 1942 decreed that all the British men not born on the Channel Islands, from the young boys of sixteen to poor old men of seventy, would be transferred to Germany. Thinking about it now, it seems bizarre that such a reasonable bureaucratic rule could regulate the Germans' inhumanity. My darling's last days are as clear in my memory as if they were yesterday. He lay in our yellow bedroom, looking out over the garden to the sea. I only left his side for the briefest periods, and slept in a chair by his bed. Early one morning I woke from an uneasy doze. I looked over to Jack. His face was grey and much too old for his sixty-two years, he was no longer the boy he had always been in my heart. Lying stiffly in the middle of the bed, arms by his side, eyes and lips closed, his breathing was so shallow that his chest hardly rose or fell. I wondered if he felt the weight of the blankets or heard the wind outside. Did he even know how I sat with him? I looked out over the garden. The vegetable patches dug in the chamomile lawn were flourishing, but the grass was long, the roses run to briars, the pond filled with sludge and rotting weeds. I wanted to lie beside my darling and hold him, just as I had each night for so many years, so after I had removed my shoes and placed them together under the bed, I pulled back the sheets and lay on my side facing Jack. He didn't move. I traced my finger across his cheekbones and down his nose to the mouth I had kissed so often. His skin was cool and very dry. I moved over and pressed my body close to his and as he made no sign that this was uncomfortable, I began to relax. The house was quiet and, for the first time in weeks, I sank into a peaceful sleep. When I woke, the soft light of late afternoon was filtering through the curtains. The breeze had dropped outside and I heard a lone bird calling for its mate. Most of the birds had been killed and I thought I would put out some potato bread for him. What depths we were reduced to in those days, eating the gentle creatures around us. It was rumoured that some desperate soul had roasted and eaten a hedgehog, but I still can't believe that was true. There were so many dreadful stories in those days, you never knew what to believe. My hand found Jack's. It was icy. I willed myself not to think of it, but I knew he was gone. I touched his cheek, my fingers slightly warming the cold flesh, then I put my arms right around him and pressed my face into his neck. We lay like that for a long time. Eventually I got up, tucked the blankets around him and closed the window. Downstairs I washed in cold water and dressed in black stockings, black slip and my best black dress. My black shoes were still under Jack's bed, so I laced on my tan brogues. I found my veiled black hat and put it on the sideboard. Even though I knew it was ridiculous, I felt uncomfortable wearing brown shoes with black and returned them to the cupboard. I looked around for my pearls, and realised I had left them upstairs too. I stood outside the bedroom door for some time before I could enter. Then I went in, raised the window and sat on the chair. I don't know what I thought about, but after some time the chirping of the little bird brought me back to the present. I bent and retrieved my shoes from under the bed and placed them beside the door. I could see my pearls lying in a shining mound on top of the blankets just below his hip. As I was picking them up I finally looked at Jack properly. His eyes were closed and his face was relaxed as if in a deep dreamless sleep. He looked years younger. He wore his favourite blue striped pyjamas from Jeremyn Street, but he was a stranger to me. I kissed him for the last time, then lifted the linen sheet to cover the face I had loved so much. I turned away, picked up my shoes and left the room, closing the door behind me. Although I hadn't noticed, that dreadful Sunday, the 1st of August 1943, had been a beautifully hot summer's day, just the sort of day Jack had always loved. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Donna Lee Brien. "Just the Sort of Day Jack Had Always Loved." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/day.php>. Chicago style: Donna Lee Brien, "Just the Sort of Day Jack Had Always Loved," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/day.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Donna Lee Brien. (1999) Just the sort of day Jack had always loved. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/day.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionPolyethylene mulch is a kind of inorganic mulch widely used in agriculture. The effects of plastic mulch debris on the structure of plant soil and root growth have been fully studied, but their effects on endophytic microbial communities have not been explored to a large extent.MethodsIn this study, High-throughput sequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA genes and fungal ITS region sequences were used to analyze microbial community structure and composition in rhizosphere soil and root endophytic of tea plant under three different weeding methods: polyethylene mulching, hand weeding and no weeding (CK).ResultsThe results showed that the weeding methods had no significant effect on the rhizosphere and root endophytic microbial abundance, but the rhizosphere bacterial structure covered by polyethylene mulch was significantly different than hand weeding and CK. The rhizosphere fungal diversity was also significantly higher than the other two analyzed treatments. The community abundance of rhizosphere microorganisms Acidobacteria, Candidatus Rokubacteria and Aspergillus covered by polyethylene mulch decreased significantly, whereas Bradyrhizobium, Solirubrobacterales and Alphaproteobacteria increased significantly. The abundance of bacteria Ktedonobacter, Reticulibacter, Ktedonosporobacter and Dictyobacter communities covered by polyethylene mulch was significantly changed, and the abundance of Fusarium and Nitrobacteraceae was significantly increased. Rhizosphere dominant bacteria were negatively correlated with soil available nitrogen content, while dominant fungi were significantly correlated with soil pH, total nitrogen and total potassium.DiscussionPolyethylene mulch forms an independent micro-ecological environment. At the same time, the soil nutrient environment was enriched by affecting the nitrogen cycle, and the composition of microbial community was affected. This study elucidated the effects of polyethylene mulch on soil microbial community in tea garden and provided a new theoretical understanding for weed management.

Herbal therapy has long been used to treat and control human diseases including mouth diseases and disorders. Also, it can minimize the potential side effects of chemical drugs. However, may be a side effects appear from plants or herbs therapy. Most of the challenges with herbal therapy revolves around inadequate information about the effect of herbs in the mouth, the mechanism of action, and potential side effects. There are several herbs and plants described in this paper that have anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-fungal, anti-disorders and anti-inflammatory in oral cavity. It includes 31 medicinal plants and herbs: Alakata pepper, Aloe vera, Airy shaw, Banana plant, Bird eye view, Bitter leaves, Bush pepper, Camelina, Cashew nut, Castor, Cinnamon, Clove, Common coleus, Common wire weed, Cypress, Fennel, Garcinia, Garden eggplant, Garlic, Ginger, Holy basil, Maca, Mint, Mexican tea, Neem, Okra, Onion, Orange fruits, Purple coneflower, Sunset shrub and Turmeric that act as alternative management option to current treatments for oral conditions such as caries, gingivitis, periodontitis, oral ulcers. In addition to, inflammation treatment after extraction, reduction dry mouth, pain, anesthesia, ill-fitting dentures. The current review of literature provides a summary of secondary metabolites most commonly used medicinal herbs and plants in maintaining oral health. They can be used in different forms such as mouthwashes, toothpastes, topical agents or local drug delivery devices. These findings show the role of antioxidant secondary metabolites in inhibiting the growth of oral pathogens and reducing oral diseases and mouth disorders.

Hibiscus sabdariffa is a common garden plant native to warm-temperate, subtropical and tropical regions throughout the world, used in traditional medicine. It is mostly cultivated for its flowers. The calyces are used as a refrigerant in form of tea (especially in making the sorrel drink popularly known as ‘zobo’ in Nigeria), jellies and jam. Aim: This study evaluates the effects of aqueous leaves extract of Hibiscus sabdariffa on the body, testis weight, histology of the testes and sperm parameter of adult male Wistar rats. Methodology: Twenty-five adult male wistar rats of 10-12 weeks and weighing about 120-140g were divided into four groups (A, B, C and D) (five rats / group), Group A was kept as control and B, C, D were administered 250 mg, 500 mg, 1000 mg of Hibiscus sabdarfia leaf extract per Kg body weight for 8 weeks. The rats in each group were fed with rat feed and water ad libitum. Administration was by means of an oral cannula. At the end of each experimental period, the rats were sacrificed by cervical dislocation, the testes were harvested and immediately fixed in Bouin’s fluid for histological procedure. However, as soon as the animals were sacrificed, the cauda epididymis was removed and semen analysis was carried out immediately. Results: There was a significant decrease in body weight of all the test groups at (P <0.05) and a significant decrease in the testes of the rats in group D when compared with the control group. Statistical analysis revealed decrease in sperm count, motility and viability with a significance decrease (P <0.05) in group D only as compared to control group. The histoarchitecture revealed significant degenerative changes characterized by vacuolization in the intestitium and seminiferous epithelium when compared with the control group. Conclusion: The aqueous leaves extract of Hibiscus sabdariffa appears to have adverse effects on the fertility of male rats especially when taken over a long period of time.

Stiltgrass [Microstegium vimineum (Trin.) A. Camus], is an annual C4 grass of Asiatic origin whose native range includes India, Pakistan, Nepal, China, Korea, and Japan (Cole et al 2004). In China, it is mainly distributed south of the Yangtze River, and is one of the most important weeds in autumn-maturing dryland crops, orchards, tea gardens, and plantations. With its high shade tolerance, M. vimineum also invades forest understories and crowds out the local vegetation (Warren et al. 2011). From June to August 2019, a leaf disease was observed causing severe defoliation of stiltgrass on the roadside of Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, China (32.045964°N, 118.840064°E). Yellow or yellow-brown necrotic spots were observed on leaf tips and margins of the lower canopy, which later expanded to the entire leaf and progressed up the plant. Disease incidence was approximately 75-85% in August. Thirty symptomatic leaves were collected, and tissue samples (5 × 5 mm) were surface disinfected with 75% ethanol for 30 s, 0.02% NaClO for 30 s, 75% ethanol for 30 s, and washed twice with sterile water. Disinfected tissues were placed on potato dextrose agar (PDA) and incubated at 28°C for 5 days. Twenty-seven morphologically similar isolates were obtained from the leaves and purified by single-spore culturing for further study. Colonies on PDA were 70 to 85 mm in diameter after 4 to 5 days, initially white becoming gray-green with flocculent aerial mycelia. Conidiophores were solitary or clustered, 85 to 139 µm long × 5 to 8 µm wide (n = 50), and conidia were obclavate to ellipsoid or spindle shaped, brown, and measured 28 to 37 µm long × 13 to 18 µm wide (n = 50) with three false dissepiments. All characteristics were consistent with the morphology of Curvularia intermedia Boedijn (Sivanesan 1987). The rDNA internal transcribed spacer (ITS), glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GPDH) and translation elongation factor (TEF) of a representative isolate (JSNJ-2019) were amplified using primers ITS1/ITS4, GPD1/GPD2 and EF1-983F/EF1-2218R (Manamgoda et al. 2014). The ITS sequence of JSNJ-2019 (GenBank: MZ613310) showed 99.83% (582/583bp) identity with C. intermedia (GenBank: MF370184 and GU073102); the GPDH sequence (GenBank: MZ701795) showed 99.66% (581/583bp) identity with C. intermedia (GenBank: LT715828) and the TEF sequence (Genbank: OM282974) showed 99.77% (864/866bp) identity with C. intermedia (GenBank: MF370186). Phylogenetic analysis based on the TEF sequences using Maximum-Likelihood and Bayesian methods placed JSNJ-2019 in the same clade with reference strain C. intermedia B19. The isolate was deposited in China Centre for Type Culture Collection (CCTCC) (Isolate code: CCTCC AF 2022041). For the pathogenicity assay, ten healthy M. vimineum plants grown in plastic pots (five to six leaf stage) were sprayed with 20ml conidial suspension (5×104 spores /ml); another ten healthy plants sprayed with sterile water served as controls. All inoculated and control plants were covered with transparent polyethylene bags immediately and were maintained in a greenhouse at 28±1℃. The transparent polyethylene bags were removed after 24 hours. The pathogenicity test was repeated three times. Five days post-inoculation, inoculated plants showed leaf blight symptoms as observed in the field, whereas no disease symptoms was observed on control plants. Reisolations were performed from inoculated plants, and the reisolated pathogen was confirmed as C. intermedia inter based on morphological and PCR assay (Konstantinova et al. 2002). No pathogens were isolated from control plants. Host range tests showed, C. intermedia JSNJ-2019 was pathogenic on corn, wheat, sorghum, barnyardgrass, crabgrass, green foxtail, Chinese sprangletop, cynodon, cogongrass, goosegrass, purslane and bedstraw and non-pathogenic on barley, rice, oat, cotton, bean, peanuts, rapeseed, tobacco and tea. These findings suggest C. intermedia could be used as a biocontrol agent against invasive M. vimineum and farmland weeds. However, application of C. intermedia as a bioherbicide should be limited to insensitive crop growing areas.

Microstegium vimineum, a Poaceae annual C4 plant, occurred widely in crop fields, tea gardens, orchards, under forests and roadsides in most provinces and regions south of the Yellow River, China. It was introduced into the eastern USA causing ecological and environmental damage (Stricker, 2016). In October 2015, M. vimineum plants with leaf spots were observed on the roadside of Mingling Road (32.04521°E, 118.84323°N), Nanjing, China. In an early stage of disease development, light brown or brown, round or oval shaped lesions appeared on the upper surface of leaves. In a middle stage, the lesions gradually expanded and the edges of the diseased leaves were lightly curled. In a late stage, leaves were withered or curled and the entire plant died. Initial disease incidence was up to 85% among natural populations of the weed. Diseased leaves collected from field were surface disinfected (75% ethanol for 30s; 1% sodium hypochlorite solution for 30s; 75% ethanol for 30s; sterile deionized water for 1min) and placed on water agar (20g agar per liter) (Kleczewski et al., 2010). Plates were incubated in the dark at 28℃ for 3 days. Following incubation, leaves, spores and conidiophores were examined using light microscopy. Single spores were obtained by using the single-spore procedure, plating out a loopful of spores onto water agar, and then carving individual spores out with associated agar under a microscope. Single spores were isolated, plated onto MV-agar (30g M. vimineum leaves, 20g agar per liter), and placed under 365 nm wavelength black light. Fungal colonies were transferred onto PDA medium, after 4 days colonies measured between 83 to 86 mm in diameter, appeared flat and dark brown, with short, light gray aerial hyphae. Conidiophores were solitary or clustered, light brown to medium brown, with pale apical color and multiple septa. The upper part was usually geniculated, 5.5-9.5 μm wide. Conidia were light yellowish brown to medium yellowish brown, mostly fusiform, straight or curved, fusoid or navicular, often slightly curved, rarely straight, smooth, 5-9 (mostly 7) septa, 48-70×10-14.5 μm (average 57×12.5 μm); hilium slightly prominent, and truncated at the base. Through morphological observation, the fungus was preliminarily identified as Bipolaris sp.. Four to five seeds of M. vimineum were planted in pots (10 cm in diameter) filled with nutrient soil, placed in the greenhouse and watered regularly. Four pots were inoculated with a conidia suspension of 1×105 sp/mL, at 4-5 true stage. Inoculated seedlings were maintained under 80% humidity and 28℃ for 24h in the dark, and then transferred to a greenhouse. Three pots of uninoculated seedlings were used as controls. Two days after the inoculation, buff-colored, irregular-shaped spots appeared centered on leaf veins. Within a week, diseased leaves became crinkled and their edges were yellow to brown due to proliferation of the spots. By 15 days, large areas of brown spots appeared on the leaves, some leaves turned yellow-brown and severely curled, and 80% of the plants had died. The diseased symptoms were similar to that of the field sample. The fungus re-isolated resulted morphologically identical to the original isolate grown on PDA medium and used for inoculation, thus fulfilled Koch’s postulates. The CTAB method was used to extract DNA from isolates of diseased leaves taken directly from the field, and the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) and glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase gene (GPDH) were amplified using primer pairs of ITS1/ITS4 and GPD/GPD2 (Manamgoda et al., 2014) respectively. The ITS amplified sequence (Genbank accession MW446193) shared 100% identity with the reference sequence of Bipolaris setariae (MN215638.1) and the GPDH amplified sequence (MW464364) shared 99.83% identity with the reference sequence of B. setariae (MK144540.1). Field experiments were conducted in Laboratory Base of Nanjing Agricultural University, where M. vimineum plants were planted. Spore suspensions with concentrations of 105, 104, 103, 102, and 101 sp/mL were prepared, distilled water was used for control, and there were four replicates of each treatment. Twenty four plots were randomly arranged, the experimental unit consisted of 50 to 60 plants in an area of 0.5m×0.6m. The interval distance between plots was about 20 cm so as to prevent the mutual influence among treatments. M. vimineum plants were inoculated at 3-4 true leaf stage. Inoculation was done at sunset, and 60 mL spore suspension was sprayed onto each plot. After spraying, the waterproof-breathable black cloth was used to cover the plots, and removed 36 hours later. The outdoor temperature was 20~28℃. After 10 days, the symptoms of M. vimineum were observed and the disease index was recorded. SPSS 20 software (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) was used for variance analysis, and Origin 9.0 (OriginLab, Hampton, MA, USA) was used to calculate the half lethal concentration (ED50) and 90% lethal concentration (ED90) of the strain MLL-1-5 on M. vimineum. Symptoms appeared on inoculated M. vimineum seedlings immediately after dark treatment. Within a week, all seedlings inoculated with the highest spore concentration were dead. Plants sprayed with water remained healthy. ED50 and ED90 of the strain MLL-1-5 was 1.9×101 and 1.4×103 sp/mL respectively, which indicated aggressiveness of the strain MLL-1-5 B. setariae. After 28 days, infected M. vimineum plants did not recover. This is the first report of leaf spot disease on M. vimineum caused by B. setariae in China. M. vimineum is a widely distributed and extremely harmful weed in China and United States. No biocontrol agents against M. vimineum are currently available. B. setariae may have potential as a biocontrol agent against M. vimineum both in China and the United States.

Dégueulasse is French slang for “disgusting,” derived in 1867 from the French verb dégueuler, to vomit. Despite its vulgar status, it is frequently used by almost every French speaker, including foreigners and students. It is also a term that has often been employed to describe the 1973 cult film, La Grande bouffe [Blow Out], by Marco Ferreri, which recounts in grotesque detail the gastronomic suicide of four male protagonists. This R-rated French-Italian production was booed, and the director spat on, at the 26th Cannes Film Festival—the Jury President, Ingrid Bergman, said it was the most “sordid” film she’d ever seen, and is even reported to have vomited after watching it (Télérama). Ferreri nevertheless walked away with the Prix FIPRESCI, awarded by the Federation of International Critics, and it is apparently the largest grossing release in the history of Paris with more than 700,000 entries in Paris and almost 3 million in France overall. Scandal sells, and this was especially seemingly so 1970s, when this film was avidly consumed as part of an unholy trinity alongside Bernardo Bertolucci’s Le Dernier Tango à Paris [Last Tango in Paris] (1972) and Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] (1973). Fast forward forty years, though, and at the very moment when La Grande bouffe was being commemorated with a special screening on the 2013 Cannes Film Festival programme, a handful of University of Melbourne French students in a subject called “Matters of Taste” were boycotting the film as an unacceptable assault to their sensibilities. Over the decade that I have been showing the film to undergraduate students, this has never happened before. In this article, I want to examine critically the questions of taste that underpin this particular predicament. Analysing firstly the intradiegetic portrayal of taste in the film, through both gustatory and aesthetic signifiers, then the choice of the film as a key element in a University subject corpus, I will finally question the (dis)taste displayed by certain students, contextualising it as part of an ongoing socio-cultural commentary on food, sex, life, and death. Framed by a brief foray into Bourdieusian theories of taste, I will attempt to draw some conclusions on the continual renegotiation of gustatory and aesthetic tastes in relation to La Grande bouffe, and thereby deepen understanding of why it has become the incarnation of dégueulasse today. Theories of Taste In the 1970s, the parameters of “good” and “bad” taste imploded in the West, following political challenges to the power of the bourgeoisie that also undermined their status as the contemporary arbiters of taste. This revolution of manners was particularly shattering in France, fuelled by the initial success of the May 68 student, worker, and women’s rights movements (Ross). The democratization of taste served to legitimize desires different from those previously dictated by bourgeois norms, enabling greater diversity in representing taste across a broad spectrum. It was reflected in the cultural products of the 1970s, including cinema, which had already broken with tradition during the New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and became a vector for political ideologies as well as radical aesthetic choices (Smith). Commonly regarded as “the decade that taste forgot,” the 1970s were also a time for re-assessing the sociology of taste, with the magisterial publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English trans. 1984). As Bourdieu refuted Kant’s differentiation between the legitimate aesthetic, so defined by its “disinterestedness,” and the common aesthetic, derived from sensory pleasures and ordinary meanings, he also attempted to abolish the opposition between the “taste of reflection” (pure pleasure) and the “taste of sense” (facile pleasure) (Bourdieu 7). In so doing, he laid the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding the apparently incommensurable choices that are not the innate expression of our unique personalities, but rather the product of our class, education, family experiences—our habitus. Where Bourdieu’s theories align most closely with the relationship between taste and revulsion is in the realm of aesthetic disposition and its desire to differentiate: “good” taste is almost always predicated on the distaste of the tastes of others. Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others. “De gustibus non est disputandum”: not because “tous les goûts sont dans la nature,” but because each taste feels itself to be natural—and so it almost is, being a habitus—which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes (Bourdieu). Although today’s “Gen Y” Melbourne University students are a long way from 1970s French working class/bourgeois culture clashes, these observations on taste as the corollary of distaste are still salient tools of interpretation of their attitudes towards La Grande bouffe. And, just as Bourdieu effectively deconstructed Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the 18th “century of taste” notions of universality and morality in aesthetics (Dickie, Gadamer, Allison) in his groundbreaking study of distinction, his own theories have in turn been subject to revision in an age of omnivorous consumption and eclectic globalisation, with various cultural practices further destabilising the hierarchies that formerly monopolized legitimate taste (Sciences Humaines, etc). Bourdieu’s theories are still, however, useful for analysing La Grande bouffe given the contemporaneous production of these texts, as they provide a frame for understanding (dis)taste both within the filmic narrative and in the wider context of its reception. Taste and Distaste in La Grande bouffe To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla […] Enough with feelings, I want to make a physiological film (Celluloid Liberation Front). Marco Ferreri’s statements about his motivations for La Grande bouffe coincide here with Bourdieu’s explanation of taste: clearly the director wished to depart from psychological cinema favoured by contemporary critics and audiences and demonstrated his distaste for their preference. There were, however, psychological impulses underpinning his subject matter, as according to film academic Maurizio Viano, Ferrari had a self-destructive, compulsive relation to food, having been forced to spend a few weeks in a Swiss clinic specialising in eating disorders in 1972–1973 (Viano). Food issues abound in his biography. In an interview with Tullio Masoni, the director declared: “I was fat as a child”; his composer Phillipe Sarde recalls the grand Italian-style dinners that he would organise in Paris during the film; and, two of the film’s stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi, actually credit the conception of La Grande bouffe to a Rabelaisian feast prepared by Tognazzi, during which Ferreri exclaimed “hey guys, we are killing ourselves!” (Viano 197–8). Evidently, there were psychological factors behind this film, but it was nevertheless the physiological aspects that Ferreri chose to foreground in his creation. The resulting film does indeed privilege the physiological, as the protagonists fornicate, fart, vomit, defecate, and—of course—eat, to wild excess. The opening scenes do not betray such sordid sequences; the four bourgeois men are introduced one by one so as to establish their class credentials as well as display their different tastes. We first encounter Ugo (Tognazzi), an Italian chef of humble peasant origins, as he leaves his elegant restaurant “Le Biscuit à soupe” and his bourgeois French wife, to take his knives and recipes away with him for the weekend. Then Michel (Piccoli), a TV host who has pre-taped his shows, gives his apartment keys to his 1970s-styled baba-cool daughter as he bids her farewell, and packs up his cleaning products and rubber gloves to take with him. Marcello (Mastroianni) emerges from a cockpit in his aviator sunglasses and smart pilot’s uniform, ordering his sexy airhostesses to carry his cheese and wine for him as he takes a last longing look around his plane. Finally, the judge and owner of the property where the action will unfold, Philippe (Noiret), is awoken by an elderly woman, Nicole, who feeds him tea and brioche, pestering him for details of his whereabouts for the weekend, until he demonstrates his free will and authority, joking about his serious life, and lying to her about attending a legal conference in London. Having given over power of attorney to Nicole, he hints at the finality of his departure, but is trying to wrest back his independence as his nanny exhorts him not to go off with whores. She would rather continue to “sacrifice herself for him” and “keep it in the family,” as she discreetly pleasures him in this scene. Scholars have identified each protagonist as an ideological signifier. For some, they represent power—Philippe is justice—and three products of that ideology: Michel is spectacle, Ugo is food, and Marcello is adventure (Celluloid Liberation Front). For others, these characters are the perfect incarnations of the first four Freudian stages of sexual development: Philippe is Oedipal, Michel is indifferent, Ugo is oral, and Marcello is impotent (Tury & Peter); or even the four temperaments of Hippocratic humouralism: Philippe the phlegmatic, Michel the melancholic, Ugo the sanguine, and Marcello the choleric (Calvesi, Viano). I would like to offer another dimension to these categories, positing that it is each protagonist’s taste that prescribes his participation in this gastronomic suicide as well as the means by which he eventually dies. Before I develop this hypothesis, I will first describe the main thrust of the narrative. The four men arrive at the villa at 68 rue Boileau where they intend to end their days (although this is not yet revealed). All is prepared for the most sophisticated and decadent feasting imaginable, with a delivery of the best meats and poultry unfurling like a surrealist painting. Surrounded by elegant artworks and demonstrating their cultural capital by reciting Shakespeare, Brillat-Savarin, and other classics, the men embark on a race to their death, beginning with a competition to eat the most oysters while watching a vintage pornographic slideshow. There is a strong thread of masculine athletic engagement in this film, as has been studied in detail by James R. Keller in “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism,” and this is exacerbated by the arrival of a young but matronly schoolmistress Andréa (Ferréol) with her students who want to see the garden. She accepts the men’s invitation to stay on in the house to become another object of competitive desire, and fully embraces all the sexual and gustatory indulgence around her. Marcello goes further by inviting three prostitutes to join them and Ugo prepares a banquet fit for a funeral. The excessive eating makes Michel flatulent and Marcello impotent; when Marcello kicks the toilet in frustration, it explodes in the famous fecal fountain scene that apparently so disgusted his then partner Catherine Deneuve, that she did not speak to him for a week (Ebert). The prostitutes flee the revolting madness, but Andréa stays like an Angel of Death, helping the men meet their end and, in surviving, perhaps symbolically marking an end to the masculinist bourgeoisie they represent.To return to the role of taste in defining the rise and demise of the protagonists, let me begin with Marcello, as he is the first to die. Despite his bourgeois attitudes, he is a modern man, associated with machines and mobility, such as the planes and the beautiful Bugatti, which he strokes with greater sensuality than the women he hoists onto it. His taste is for the functioning mechanical body, fast and competitive, much like himself when he is gorging on oysters. But his own body betrays him when his “masculine mechanics” stop functioning, and it is the fact that the Bugatti has broken down that actually causes his death—he is found frozen in driver’s seat after trying to escape in the Bugatti during the night. Marcello’s taste for the mechanical leads therefore to his eventual demise. Michel is the next victim of his own taste, which privileges aesthetic beauty, elegance, the arts, and fashion, and euphemises the less attractive or impolite, the scatological, boorish side of life. His feminized attire—pink polo-neck and flowing caftan—cannot distract from what is happening in his body. The bourgeois manners that bind him to beauty mean that breaking wind traumatises him. His elegant gestures at the dance barre encourage rather than disguise his flatulence; his loud piano playing cannot cover the sound of his loud farts, much to the mirth of Philippe and Andréa. In a final effort to conceal his painful bowel obstruction, he slips outside to die in obscene and noisy agony, balanced in an improbably balletic pose on the balcony balustrade. His desire for elegance and euphemism heralds his death. Neither Marcello nor Michel go willingly to their ends. Their tastes are thwarted, and their deaths are disgusting to them. Their cadavers are placed in the freezer room as silent witnesses to the orgy that accelerates towards its fatal goal. Ugo’s taste is more earthy and inherently linked to the aims of the adventure. He is the one who states explicitly: “If you don’t eat, you won’t die.” He wants to cook for others and be appreciated for his talents, as well as eat and have sex, preferably at the same time. It is a combination of these desires that kills him as he force-feeds himself the monumental creation of pâté in the shape of the Cathedral of Saint-Peter that has been rejected as too dry by Philippe, and too rich by Andréa. The pride that makes him attempt to finish eating his masterpiece while Andréa masturbates him on the dining table leads to a heart-stopping finale for Ugo. As for Philippe, his taste is transgressive. In spite of his upstanding career as a judge, he lies and flouts convention in his unorthodox relationship with nanny Nicole. Andréa represents another maternal figure to whom he is attracted and, while he wishes to marry her, thereby conforming to bourgeois norms, he also has sex with her, and her promiscuous nature is clearly signalled. Given his status as a judge, he reasons that he can not bring Marcello’s frozen body inside because concealing a cadaver is a crime, yet he promotes collective suicide on his premises. Philippe’s final transgression of the rules combines diabetic disobedience with Oedipal complex—Andréa serves him a sugary pink jelly dessert in the form of a woman’s breasts, complete with cherries, which he consumes knowingly and mournfully, causing his death. Unlike Marcello and Michel, Ugo and Philippe choose their demise by indulging their tastes for ingestion and transgression. Following Ferreri’s motivations and this analysis of the four male protagonists, taste is clearly a cornerstone of La Grande bouffe’s conception and narrative structure. It is equally evident that these tastes are contrary to bourgeois norms, provoking distaste and even revulsion in spectators. The film’s reception at the time of its release and ever since have confirmed this tendency in both critical reviews and popular feedback as André Habib’s article on Salo and La Grande bouffe (2001) meticulously demonstrates. With such a violent reaction, one might wonder why La Grande bouffe is found on so many cinema studies curricula and is considered to be a must-see film (The Guardian). Corpus and Corporeality in Food Film Studies I chose La Grande bouffe as the first film in the “Matters of Taste” subject, alongside Luis Bunuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, and Laurent Bénégui’s Au Petit Marguery, as all are considered classic films depicting French eating cultures. Certainly any French cinema student would know La Grande bouffe and most cinephiles around the world have seen it. It is essential background knowledge for students studying French eating cultures and features as a key reference in much scholarly research and popular culture on the subject. After explaining the canonical status of La Grande bouffe and thus validating its inclusion in the course, I warned students about the explicit nature of the film. We studied it for one week out of the 12 weeks of semester, focusing on questions of taste in the film and the socio-cultural representations of food. Although the almost ubiquitous response was: “C’est dégueulasse!,” there was no serious resistance until the final exam when a few students declared that they would boycott any questions on La Grande bouffe. I had not actually included any such questions in the exam. The student evaluations at the end of semester indicated that several students questioned the inclusion of this “disgusting pornography” in the corpus. There is undoubtedly less nudity, violence, gore, or sex in this film than in the Game of Thrones TV series. What, then, repulses these Gen Y students? Is it as Pasolini suggests, the neorealistic dialogue and décor that disturbs, given the ontologically challenging subject of suicide? (Viano). Or is it the fact that there is no reason given for the desire to end their lives, which privileges the physiological over the psychological? Is the scatological more confronting than the pornographic? Interestingly, “food porn” is now a widely accepted term to describe a glamourized and sometimes sexualized presentation of food, with Nigella Lawson as its star, and hundreds of blog sites reinforcing its popularity. Yet as Andrew Chan points out in his article “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” this film is where it all began: “the genealogy reaches further back, as brilliantly visualized in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande bouffe, in which four men eat, screw and fart themselves to death” (47). Is it the overt corporeality depicted in the film that shocks cerebral students into revulsion and rebellion? Conclusion In the guise of a conclusion, I suggest that my Gen Y students’ taste may reveal a Bourdieusian distaste for the taste of others, in a third degree reaction to the 1970s distaste for bourgeois taste. First degree: Ferreri and his entourage reject the psychological for the physiological in order to condemn bourgeois values, provoking scandal in the 1970s, but providing compelling cinema on a socio-political scale. Second degree: in spite of the outcry, high audience numbers demonstrate their taste for scandal, and La Grande bouffe becomes a must-see canonical film, encouraging my choice to include it in the “Matters of Taste” corpus. Third degree: my Gen Y students’ taste expresses a distaste for the academic norms that I have embraced in showing them the film, a distaste that may be more aesthetic than political. Oui, c’est dégueulasse, mais … Bibliography Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1984. Calvesi, M. “Dipingere all moviola” (Painting at the Moviola). Corriere della Sera, 10 Oct. 1976. Reprint. “Arti figurative e il cinema” (Cinema and the Visual Arts). Avanguardia di massa. Ed. M. Calvesi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. 243–46. Celluloid Liberation Front. “Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures.” Bright Lights Film Journal 60 (2008). 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://brightlightsfilm.com/60/60lagrandebouffe.php#.Utd6gs1-es5›. Chan, Andrew. “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 3.4 (2003): 47–53. Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Ebert, Roger, “La Grande bouffe.” 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/la-grande-bouffe-1973›. Ferreri, Marco. La Grande bouffe. Italy-France, 1973. Freedman, Paul H. Food: The History of Taste. U of California P, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald C. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1999. Habib, André. “Remarques sur une ‘réception impossible’: Salo and La Grande bouffe.” Hors champ (cinéma), 4 Jan. 2001. 11 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/cinema/030101/salo-bouffe.html›. Keller, James R. “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism.” Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2006: 49–59. Masoni, Tullio. Marco Ferreri. Gremese, 1998. Pasolini, P.P. “Le ambigue forme della ritualita narrativa.” Cinema Nuovo 231 (1974): 342–46. Ross, Kristin. May 68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Smith, Alison. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Télérama: “La Grande bouffe: l’un des derniers grands scandales du Festival de Cannes. 19 May 2013. 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.telerama.fr/festival-de-cannes/2013/la-grande-bouffe-l-un-des-derniers-grands-scandales-du-festival-de-cannes,97615.php›. The Guardian: 1000 films to see before you die. 2007. 17 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/film/series/1000-films-to-see-before-you-die› Tury, F., and O. Peter. “Food, Life, and Death: The Film La Grande bouffe of Marco Ferreri in an Art Psychological Point of View.” European Psychiatry 22.1 (2007): S214. Viano, Maurizio. “La Grande Abbuffata/La Grande bouffe.” The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower Press, 2004: 193–202.

By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).