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Hong Pong

In your Telegraph column today you have a letter from someone wishing to get rid of the smell of cigarette smoke. There are two 'natural' solutions. The first is to fill a cardboard box with grass clippings collected when the grass is dry. Store the box on the back seat for a few weeks and the smell will be destroyed. The alternative is to use an old fashioned cure that was used to remove the mustiness from churches before the advent of central heating. This is based on the ground cover plant Sweet Woodruff (Galium odoratum). I have it in my garden. All you do is pull up a load of the foliage and let it dry in a box as before. After about 3 weeks the cigarette odour should have been destroyed but if not, a repeat dose will do the trick. Both the drying grass and Sweet Woodruff release the chemical coumarin (smell of hay) and this does the trick. It also gets rid of dog stench.

Asked on 4 July 2009 by

Answered by Honest John
Brilliant. Many thanks. I will try to make sure that gets published.
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