420 
ance as a weed. It very frequently occurs on 
gravelly lands and on all sorts of dry soil, whether 
light or heavy; and is usually an indication that 
a stratum of gravel lies under the surface. Its 
root is creeping and ramified, and strikes very 
deep; its stems are numerous and weak, trailing 
along the ground, and twisting themselves round 
neighbouring plants; its leaves are triangular 
and arrow-pointed ; and its flowers are produced 
from the side of the branches, each on the top of 
| a long footstalk, and they have a fragrance like 
the flowers of the heliotrope, but fainter, and 
display great diversity of delicate tinting, from 
almost pure white, through all the shades of 
flesh-colour, to the most beautiful pink, with 
yellowish plaits and stains of crimson. An enthu- 
siastic florist admiring these exquisite flowers, as 
he detects some among any crop of the kit- 
chen-garden, and a plodding operative gardener 
gazing on the same flowers as the production of 
one of the most stubborn weeds with which he 
has to contend, display a most ludicrous contrast 
| of attitude and expression, and might form not 
a bad subject for the pencil of a comic painter. 
This plant is indeed an excessive pest to both 
gardener and farmer,—especially to the latter ; 
and seems to have received its strange name of 
devil’s guts from its power of tormenting. Mr. 
Lisle, after observing that he believes it to pro- 
pagate itself in pasture ground chiefly by its 
roots, and in arable land by its seeds, assigns as 
a reason why it is most apt to multiply in strong 
clayey soils, that these are usually ploughed in 
winter or not earlier than spring, and, so far from 
being cleansed as if ploughed in summer fallow, 
suffer an absolute multiplication of the bindweed 
from the stirring and separating of its roots and 
offsets. “Ihave known in this case,” says he, 
“clay land folded for barley, and particularly that 
| part of it which, waiting for the folds going over 
it last, was latest fallowed, bring up so great an 
increase of withwind, that, though the spring and 
summer had been very dry, every stem of barley 
had a withwind round it. As the field brought 
up a crop of this corn, it brought up with each 
plant its enemy, which would eat it out, pull it 
down before it could ripen, and thereby prevent 
the filling of the grain. The crop is also greatly 
hazarded here, after it is cut, by the danger it 
must run by being in swarth till this weed is 
withered, before 16 can be carted. Again, near 
the end of the first summer, after the first year 
of a crop of hop-clover, which I fed, that is about 
the beginning of August, I fallowed a ground for 
wheat, then dunged the fallows, and sowed my 
wheat before Michaelmas. I had a very good 
crop of wheat; but a.withwind came up to every 
plant; so that had it been a wet and cold sum- 
mer, instead of a hot and dry one as it chanced 
to be, my corn would have been pulled down and 
lodged, while green in the ear, and in the milk, 
and could not then have filled in body and flour, 
but must have been of the nature of blighted 
BINDWEED. 
corn. The increase of the withwind here was, 
without doubt, occasioned by the laying down 
this ground only to one summer-seed after the 
hop clover was sown, when it had borne three or 
four crops of summer corn after its wheat crop ; 
for by the winter ploughings, the offsets of the 
roots of weeds, and their seeds, were propa- 
gated. I could not conveniently destroy these 
roots or seeds by giving the ground a seasonable 
summer-fallow in the beginning of June, because 
I should then have lost the fruits of my hop 
clover crop, by ploughing it in at the beginning 
of the first summer; though this would have 
contributed much to the killing of the withwind; 
whereas by delaying the fallowing three months 
longer, to the beginning of August, when the 
sun had lost its strength to burn up the roots 
and mall the seeds, and it was too late for the 
ground to lie long to a fallow, the dung laid on 
the fallows gave new life to the roots and seeds.” 
The scammony bindweed, Convolvulus scam- 
monia, is a hardy twining perennial, and was in- 
troduced to Great Britain from the Levant, to- 
wards the close of the 16th century. It isa 
native of Syria, Mysia, Cappadocia, and Cochin | 
China, and is particularly abundant on the moun- 
tains between Aleppo and Latachea. Its root is 
tapering, three or four feet in length, from three | 
to four inches in diameter, covered with a light | 
grey bark, and contains a milky juice ; its stems | 
are slender, numerous, and from 15 to 20 feet in 
length ; its leaves are smooth, arrow-shaped, and 
bright green, and stand upon long footstalks ; and 
its flowers are yellow, white, or purple, and funnel- 
shaped, stand in pairs upon pedicles, and bloom 
in July and August. The powerfully drastic 
purgative drug called scammony, or resinous gum 
scammony, and used by druggists as an ingre- 
dient in some of their pills, is obtained from the 
roots of this plant, and imported principally from 
Syria.— Both the jalap and the sweet potato 
bindweeds, Convolvulus jalapa and Convolvulus 
batatas, the former producing the well known 
jalap of the drug shops, and the roots of the lat- 
ter constituting the well known sweet potato, 
rank in modern times as ipomeeas. See the ar- 
ticle lpomaa. 
The great hedge bindweed or bearbind, formerly 
called Convolvulus sepium, but now usually called 
Calystegia sepium, is a perennial twining weed of 
Great Britain, beautiful for its flowers, but an- 
noying for its weedy and twining habit. Its roots 
are long, rather fleshy, and extensively creeping ; 
its stems are smooth, leafy, and somewhat branch- 
ed, and grow usually to the height of about 6 
feet, but sometimes to the height of 10 or 12; its 
leaves are arrow-shaped, and seem as if torn at 
the base; and its flowers are large, solitary, and 
white, and flourish from June till September. A 
variety, called Calystegia sepium incarnata, has 
reddish flowers of an uniform flesh or rose colour. 
The great hedge bindweed grows luxuriantly at 
the bottom of moist hedges, in osier holts, in wet 
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