FIELD BINDWEED (Wild Morning Glory) 

 Convolvulus acvensis L. 



Summer Around the dingiest tenements, bordering the forbidding 



Waste places fences around grimy factories, in the black, cindery ballast 

 of railroad embankments and railroad yards, the field 

 bindweed produces bright white trumpets all summer long. It may be 

 called a weed, an introduced weed which came oyer from Europe some 

 time ago, but it is neyertheless one of the few, if not the only, flowers 

 to grow undisturbed in the most impossible conditions of cities. It seems 

 to thriye in a sooty atmosphere where eyen the summer sun shines 

 through a haze of dirty air, where coal smoke blackens the Monday wash 

 before it is dry, where locomotiyes spew forth a cindery breath, or the 

 smokestacks of factories belch black grime. Perhaps this is because fresh 

 flowers open eyery morning, and the old flowers of the day before, their 

 brief work done, are forming seeds in their fertilized oyaries. There along 

 the sidewalk, the wire fence, the ballast, the bindweed plants coyer eyeiy 

 inch permitted it, and eyen climb up the wire mesh of the factory fence 

 or caress the creosoted railroad ties or entwine the telephone pole's 

 guy wires. 



This Conyolyulus, like the other moniing glories, is of tropical 

 origin, where the first morning glories may have known the humid 

 moisture and warmth of Jungles and climbed high and wide into the 

 forest trees. The morning glories we have today may have been left in 

 the north when a warmer climate departed with the approach of the 

 continental ice mass. At any rate, the bindweeds, both native and intro- 

 duced, are generous with their flowers and lavish with their vines and 

 leaves. 



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