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castor-oil plant
(redirected from castor bean plant)

    Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.14 sec.

castor-oil plant

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Castor-oil plant (Ricinus communis).
(credit: Kenneth and Brenda Formanek/EB Inc.)
Large plant (Ricinus communis) of the spurge family, probably native to Africa and naturalized throughout the tropics. It is grown commercially for the pharmaceutical and industrial uses of its oil and for use in landscape gardening because of its handsome, giant, fanlike leaves. The bristly, spined, bronze-to-red clusters of fruits are attractive but are often removed before they mature because of the poison concentrated in their mottled, beanlike seeds. There are hundreds of natural forms and many horticultural varieties of this species.



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Other ideas included moth balls, shoving finely crushed glass down the holes (ugh), planting a castor bean plant (its roots are supposedly poison to gophers), or sticking a couple of those lawn pinwheel figures by the holes because the gophers can't stand the vibrations they cause when spinning in the wind.
GUM UP THOSE PESKY GOPHERS' PLANS by Daily News (Los Angeles, CA)
Inquiries were spurned by news reports linking the al Qaeda terrorist group to a northern Iraq laboratory suspected of producing ricin toxin, a byproduct of the widely available castor bean plant.
Field Test for Ricin Toxin Available from Osborn Scientific; Company ... by Business Wire
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