That "Fresh Cut Grass" smells so good and calming. But is there a word for the smell of freshly cut grass? I know the word "petrichor" means the smell of rain after a long dry-spell. Then it should be a name for the smell that produced after we mowed our lawn, right?
Coumarin Interestingly, an anticoagulant (predecessor of warfarin rat poison) produced by damaged plants in an attempt to get rid of herbivores.
That’s interesting — I know of warfarin fr farm days and then Coumadin fr healthcare work days Here is an article about how cows (then lab animals) helped create the human medication This month in 1939: How dead cattle led to the discovery of warfarin - PMLiVE
I do believe that dried sweet grass and sweet woodruff also contain the coumarin. They smell wonderful!
A Google Scholar search for "fresh cut grass aroma" brings up hexanal (Cis-3-hexenol) as responsible for the smell of freshly cut grass. I'm certainly not an organic chemist (I barely passed the final exam), but I'd guess that the two aromatic compounds, coumarin and hexanal, smell different. The Coumarin wiki relates some very interesting facts about its natural presence in plants, and its uses in commerce (like in alcoholic drinks and cigarettes). Coumarin might smell nice, but it's a known feeding deterrent (it tastes terrible), and it is not permitted as a "deliberate addition" to food in Canada, and is banned as a food additive in the US. And I'm definitely going to make sure that the cinnamon sticks I use for mulled wine are from Cinnamomum verum (Ceylon cinnamon) and not from C. cassia (Chinese cinnamon).
It looks like the Indonesian and Saigon sources are even more the ones to worry about. From your coumarin link: Ceylon cinnamon or true cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum): 0.005 to 0.090 mg/g Chinese cinnamon or Chinese cassia (C. cassia): 0.085 to 0.310 mg/g Indonesian cinnamon or Padang cassia (C. burmannii): 2.14 to 9.30 mg/g Saigon cinnamon or Vietnamese cassia (C. loureiroi): 1.06 to 6.97 mg/g And they could be worth worry about - on this page, the taste winner is the Indonesian one: The Best Cinnamon You Can Buy at the Store | Epicurious. There is a list of other brands tested showing which cinnamon is used, for some of them. The korintje is Indonesian, 365 is Safeway's brand. I guess the occasional sakuramochi won't kill us, not that I've got into that. Cherry blossom - Wikipedia
Worth adding that the bark of the two species is harvested very differently, so are easily distinguished. With C. verum, only the inner bark is used, so it is thin (<0.5 mm thick) sheets of fairly smooth buff-brown, which are wrapped over each other in multiple layers in each quill. With C. cassia, the whole bark is used, so the bark pieces are around 1-2 mm thick, hard and woody-textured, grey-brown on the outside, dark brown on the inner side.
