Lindsey Cardell

Image by Krzysztof Golik

Smell from mysterious plant found on campus makes students want to barf

By Lindsey Cardell

The new semester at UW-Madison is now in full swing as students across campus are all moved in and buried alive by school work. But while students all across campus have found their rhythm and are creating their routines for the semester, there appears to be one particular nuisance that is unavoidable if one ever wishes to leave the dim, dusty quarters of their dorm room and gorge themselves at a university dining hall. 

As students living in the Lakeshore Neighborhood have noticed, the main entrance to many of their dining hall options, such as Four Lakes or Carsen’s, is surrounded by a mysterious grass plant that gives off a particularly potent aroma. This leads to a juxtaposition of inequity and further anguish- to pay $6.59 for a bowl of pasta and a cookie, and then immediately throw it up when leaving the dining hall due to landscaping preferences.

We asked students to describe the smell, and while no one was actually able to come up with something that smelled as horrendous as the plant, we did get some responses about what smells better than this plant. Some honorable mentions were “burning hair,” “the compost in the trash room,” and our favorite, “the Taco Bell bathroom on a Tuesday night.” None of these horrendous smells can even compare to the rotten, gag-worthy stench of this grass plant. 

This plant has caused so much pain to the nostrils of students everywhere that many students have asked the University to remove the mysterious plant from campus. The University is said to have received over ten-thousand complaints concerning the plant, but they have chosen to continue displaying the plant on campus because it is rumored to “keep away those pesky bugs.” 

Disappointment and disgust continue to course through the veins of UW students across campus as the rotten plant that has plagued their lives seems to have won the battle. As students leaving the dining halls continue struggling to keep their meals down, they are all left dreaming of an early winter with the hope that the plant’s stench won’t survive the harsh Wisconsin weather. 

*This article originally appeared in The Daily Cardinal on October 4, 2018 in the satirical section