Wild-Flower Study 



535 



Hedge binJu', , ,/ 



THE 



HEDGE BINDWEED 



Teacher's Story 



I once saw by the roadside a beautiful 

 pyramid, covered completely with green 

 leaves and beset with pink flowers. I 

 stopped to examine this bit of landscape 

 gardening, and for the first time in my life 

 I felt sorry for a burdock; for this burdock 

 had met its match and more in standing up 

 against a weakling plant which it must have 

 scorned at first, had it been capable of this sensa- 

 tion. Its mighty leaves had withered, its flower- 

 stems showed no burs; for the bindweed had 

 caught it in its hundred embraces and had 

 squeezed the life out of it. Once in Northern 

 Florida our eyes were delighted with the most 

 beautiful garden we had ever seen and which 

 resolved itself later into a field of corn, in which 

 every plant had been made a trellis for the bind- 

 weed ; there it flaunted its pink and white flowers 

 in the sunshine with a grace and charm that sug- 

 gested nothing of the oppressor. 



Sometimes the bindweed fails to find support 

 to lift it into the air. Then it quite as cheerfully 

 mats itself over the grass, making a carpet of 

 exquisite pattern. This vine has quite an effi- 

 cient way of taking hold. It lifts its growing tips 

 into the air, swaying them joyously with every 

 breeze ; and the way each extreme tip is bent into 



a hook seems just a matter of grace and beauty, as do the two or three 

 loose quirls below it ; when during its graceful swaying the hook catches to 

 some object, it makes fast with amazing rapidity ; later the young arrow- 

 shaped leaves manage to get an ear over the support, and in a very short 

 time the vine makes its first loop, and the deed is done. It is very partic- 

 ular to twine and wind in one way, following the direction of the hands 

 of the clock from the right, under, and from the left, over the object to 

 which it clings. If the support is firm, it only makes enough turns around 



