The warm, old world look of traditional homes in Tuscany has inspired a popular style of home decor. Stenciled motifs that evoke rural Italy provide charming finishing detail to a room decorated in the Tuscan style.

Whatever room you are seeking to make over, Tuscan-style wall motifs can be wonderfully effective. Kitchens, living rooms and outdoor spaces can all be enhanced with stenciled Tuscan motifs. Their soft, old world look can also look good in bedrooms and even bathrooms.

The contemporary Tuscan look, inspired by rustic dwellings, is stylish yet informal. The Tuscan wall motifs that adorned ordinary homes have a folksy feel and home-made quality. Wall decorations, which included patterned borders, motifs used as visual accents and even whole murals, served much the same function as patterned wallpaper in other decor styles.

Stencils for the Tuscan Look

The classic motifs in Tuscan decorative work are drawn from nature and reflect the flora of Italy and the Mediterranean region. Think of Italy and olive groves may be one of the first things to come to mind. Not only does the olive branch motif evoke the Tuscan sun, but the muted gray-green color of the leaves fits perfectly into the spectrum of hues in the Tuscan palette.

Even in these days of dishwashers, most people spend some time every day in front of the kitchen sink - which adds up to several days a year! So why not make it something that’s enjoyable to look at? Faux backsplashes for kitchen or bathroom sinks can be an attractive feature of a room. The key to stylish decorating is co-ordination and detail and with faux painting techniques you can make a backsplash that enhances the dcor of a room.

Backsplash Paint Finishes

The popularity of faux painting lies in its versatility and economy. For a fraction of the cost of the real thing, you can create a faux finish backsplash that simulates the material of your choice, whatever that may be. Stone, wood, ceramic tiles and even metal finishes are among the possibilities.

Faux painting allows you to add details that help to co-ordinate the appearance of a room. You might want a faux stone backsplash to match granite countertops or faux wood to match floors and cupboards. A marble backsplash can look luxurious in a bathroom. Extending actual tiles is easily and cheaply done by using paint to simulate what you already have. If the area behind the taps is plain and dull, a suitable painted motif or pattern can add visual interest.

Madagascan oil is required to have a minimum eugenol content of 82 per cent. It is however reported that Indonesian oil, which used to have a reputation for decidedly inferior quality and low eugenol content, now contains 80-82 per cent eugenol and is often preferred to oil originating in Madagascar.

The price for this oil in July 1974 was reported to be about 3.32 per kilogramme and falling slowly but steadily. There have been times during which Indonesian prices were higher than Madagascan prices owing to exceptionally high local rates of inflation in Indonesia, and this was true during the initial stages of the mid-1970s price increases.

The demand for clove leaf oil seems likely to remain buoyant, at least for some years. In spite of obvious reluctance of users in the past, this oil has gained ground at the expense of the dearer and scarcer stem oil, a trend which may well continue. The oil additionally remains unchallenged as a source of eugenol, but if its price were to rise much above its present level it might lose part of this market to cinnamon leaf oil or, ultimately, to a synthetic eugenol which, although not yet a commercial proposition, presents a potential competitive threat.

One way to spice up the bedroom is with bed decorating ideas. That is probably not what you expected to hear, right? Because the bedroom is a private part of the house separate from the rest of your home, you have license to have a little fun with the atmosphere of the room. And, the one place where you can have the most impact is the bed.

The bed is the focal point of the room and everything expands out from it. Think about when you enter any bedroom. The first thing you see and look at is the bed. A boring bed can mean a boring room. An exciting room can begin with the bed.

There is no limit on how many bed decorating ideas there are. Whatever you can cook up you can use on your bed. Let’s start with the comforter, which is one of the centerpieces on any bed. A nice warm comforter can grace your bed to instantly enhance the look of your bed and your room. Do not forget that can also change the look of your bed be adding or changing the duvet covers on your comforter.

According to Rosengarten (1969), custom records show that cloves were imported into Alexandria by A.D. 176. The Emperor Constantine is said to have presented St Silvester, Bishop of Rome, A.D. 314-35, with numerous vessels of gold and silver, incense, and spices, including 150 pounds of cloves. By the fourth century cloves were well known round the Mediterranean and by the eighth century throughout Europe.

The Dutch, using repugnant, oppressive and often bloody measures, were to retain the monopoly for nearly another 200 years. By 1651 the Dutch had instituted a scheme limiting the cultivation of cloves to the island of Amboina, insisting on the uprooting of cloves on the other islands. The penalty for the possession, selling and cultivation of cloves except on Amboina was death.

The orders were particularly cruel, as it was the custom in the Moluccas for the indigenous people to plant a clove tree for the birth of each child, which helped to keep a record of the child’s age; if the tree was subsequently destroyed it portended doom for the child. The Dutch aimed to create an artificial scarcity and maintained prices by destroying surplus cloves which came onto the market. They made Batavia (Djakarta) the entrepot for cloves. Rutnphius (1626-1702) gives a very accurate account of the clove tree and method of production in his Herbarium Amboinense.

At least until the early 1960s, trade in cloves was carried out in the traditional, familiar manner, by large numbers of shipping agents, merchants, dealers and brokers. Since the political changes in Zanzibar in 1964, however, the situation has changed somewhat. The role of merchants and dealers has diminished primarily because the supply prices were more rigidly fixed after the Zanzibar upheaval than had previously been the case, and the general feeling in the trade was that little or no further profit could be made.

After further temporary rises it appeared as if the price would stabilize at around the 1.70-1.80 per kilogramme mark and the trade widely expected a down-turn, but at the beginning of 1974 yet another sharp rise occurred which was maintained through 1975. After stabilizing at 3.30 during the first three quarters of 1976, a further rise brought the price to over 4.00 per kilogramme in 1977. It should be appreciated, however, that pressure on sterling at the end of 1976 will have caused some distortion to the latter part of the price series.

The vegetative propagation of cloves has always been difficult and attempts in many regions have failed. Fernie (1946) showed that terminal leafy softwood cuttings taken with a heel gave the most promise of success, when grown in glazed propagating frames with high humidity, adequate light and bottom heat.

Various methods of vegetative propagation have been tried in Zanzibar but with little success. Temporary unions have been successfully achieved by grafting on to other species of Syzygium and on to guava, Psidium guajava L. Successful Marching has been reported from India, but there is no indication that this has been achieved on any scale (Yegna Narayan Aiyer, 1960). Dufournet and Rodriguez (1972) reported success for the first time in 1971 in Madagascar of tongue-approach of twigs 4-8 mm in diameter on to Syzygium cumini (L.) Skeels (syn: Eugenia cumini (L.) Druce; E. jambolana Lamk.)

Despite the ordinance, plants were distributed in 1772 to Bourbon (Reunion) and the Seychelles, and later to Cayenne. Plants were also taken to Martinique and Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Poivre was succeeded as superintendent in Mauritius by MaillartDumesle and later by Cere. The colonists of Reunion (Bourbon) were more enthusiastic for spices than those of Mauritius and by the turn of the century were producing cloves on a commercial scale.

The genus Syzygium, with about 500 species, belongs to the family Myrtaceae, which has some 75 genera and 3 000 species of trees and shrubs, with their chief centres of distribution in the American and Asian tropics and in Australia. The large genus Eucalyptus L’Herit. with some 500 species is almost entirely confined to Australia. Several species of Syzygium are grown for their rather insipid fruits, of which the commonest are: the jambolan, S. cumini (L.)

Eugenia cumini (L.) Druce; E. jambolana Lamk.); the rose apple, S. jambos (L.) Alston (syn. E. jambos L.); the pomerac, S. malaccensis (L.) Merr. & Perry (syn. E. malaccensis L.). The New World Eugenia uniflora L. is the pitanga or Surinam cherry, a native of Brazil. One of the best-known fruits in the family is the guava, Psidium guajava L.

This is superior in odour and flavour to the other two types of clove oils and, up until recently, has been distilled only in some of the most highly industrialized consumer countries with modern equipment. Production of clove bud oil has now commenced in the Malagasy Republic.

It was recommended that the iron swan necks, condensers and separators should be replaced by similar equipment made of aluminium; it was later reported that private distillers had ‘invested in modern apparatus which produces a very light-coloured oil of perfect quality’. It has been found in many cases in Madagascar that distillation of leaves leads to over-harvesting for present gain at the cost of subsequent clove harvests.

The eugenol content of the oil is dependent upon the time taken to distil the charge. A rapid distillation provides an oil with a high eugenol content, and Belcher (1965) recommends this procedure if the oil is to be used purely as a source of eugenol.

Clove leaf oil is produced in the Malagasy Republic and, to a lesser extent, Indonesia. In Madagascar the oil is distilled in the clovecool spring water for the condensers is freely available.

Pimento oleoresin is prepared exclusively in the Western European and North American consuming centres, and on a very small scale. The tendency for oleoresins to supersede ground spices in food manufacture has not been as evident in the case of pimento as with other spices such as pepper, ginger and nutmeg.

The small quantities which are prepared are used in the meat processing and canning industry in the same way as the ground spice. Pimento oleoresin, like all oleoresins, has an advantage over the ground spice in that it avoids the risk of bacterial contamination and its strength and quality are more consistent, weight for weight.

The symptoms of die-back, which rarely attacks immature trees, resemble that caused by C. fimbriata on other tree crops. The disease usually starts on one limb as a result of branch breaking or other injury and spreads over the tree in a period of years. If the primary infection is below the crotch of the tree, death may occur within a few months. Bark canker and dark streaking of the wood of the infected parts occur, together with drying out of the leaves as the die-back progresses from limb to limb.