Fight for the light... the fearsome foe, convolvulus

Dear Gentle Reader,

On Wednesday, I stumbled over to Dominic Rivron's e-allotment and found him talking about an old, bitter enemy of mine.

Convolvulus.

Lovely name.

Fearsome beast.

It has an instinctive intellect that only the unwise laugh off as vegetative.

This thing has only one thought.

Success.

And success, for convolvulus, means domination.

Convolvulus has one aim; to swallow the light in your life. This is a creature of nightmares.

I think I ought to warn you about convolvulus. So, today, a warning, some history, some myth, and a cautionary tale. Not necessarily in that order.

Gentle Reader, I take this foe seriously, and I think you should, too.

So, we'll go to the beginning to properly understand it.

In times of trouble, for most of the history of the Western world, men and women have looked to the learned ones, the literate ones, for help in understanding threats.

Then folks go to the powerful ones to protect them.

In the West, the literate ones, for most of our history, have been the priestly caste of the Christian faith.

Christians turn to one book for guidance, when all is dark.

"Fiat lux!", that book proclaims; right in the first chapter.

Right in the beginning those seekers found light.

Our genesis, metaphysically and physically, is a journey to light.

"Fiat lux" proclaims The Book.

Let there be light.

Of course, this is the short form.

It comes from "dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux" (Gen. 1:3) in the vulgate Latin, or, "And God said let there be light, and there was light".

And that is what convolvulus is after...

Light.

We appear to be in conflict with convolvulus from the moment we are born.

From the dark floor of the forest, convolvulus rises and shoots up, like a snake, wanting to seize the light. And it stops at nothing to get it, to get that precious light.

Convolvulus lurks in forests and fields and gardens and ditches.

It lurks by trees and by shrubs, by stumps and by fences, by walls and by sheds.

Convolvulus lurks, hoping to snag unwary interlopers in its domain...

Coming across an interloper, convolvulus reaches out and embraces the outsider in a tight grip. But, mark my words, Gentle Reader, its embrace is not a loving grip.

Convolvulus will strangle, if it can, and march up the corpse, going ever higher, seeking light.

Convolvulus.

The name rolls and writhes around in the mouth.

And the soil.

Like a fearsome serpent.

Convolvulus roils and coils around fence posts and drainpipes and chairs and even Granddads who spend too long in the field, I am told.

In North America some jokester thought he (or she) would call this stuff Morning Glory.

Presumably because, as the morning is the glory of the day with the rising sun, so convolvulus greets the morning as the victor on the field of battle, having overwhelmed and strangled its competitors in its photosynthetic search for light and canopy dominance.

The English call convolvulus bindweed. Far more appropriate than morning glory.

I call it "Bloody Hell. Not again. I cleared that patch yesterday!" or "Aieeeeee".

Which brings me to the memory that Dominic's post unveiled.

And my warning tale.

This was a few years ago.

In my less astute days.

Your Hero, Pommes, still roamed the fields looking for hapless birds and mice and deer and bear to devour.

Your Heroine was desirous of a garden, despite the close proximity of lovely farmer's markets.

"How wonderful if we could grow our own food..." she exclaimed one day.

And passed your humble scribe the shovel.

After seeking permission from the landlord, approval was received to convert sod and turf to a small garden.

Your humble scribe ventured into the Canadian wilderness of Vancouver and proceeded to cleave the sod into strips and roll it up and off the underlying soil.

Your humble scribe had also rented a roto-tiller, which is a mechanised, dual-purpose, soil and body breaker.

By the end of the morning I had lost the capacity for sensation in my upper torso.

Then, I regained sensation through the wonders of bursitis.

With the garden-to-be only half churned over, but my joints fully churned, help was needed.

I called my Dad.

He heard my plea and came and finished the remainder of the garden-to-be.

Now, to be fair on your Heroine, she had already helped me clear the morning glory from the back of the garage, the fence, the trees, the side of the house, the grass, and the two shovels, the stump, the bits of a bike, and other odds and sods that we hadn't known were there, lost in the blackness under the foliage of the convolvulus.

Morning glory, or convolvulus, is tough.

But, we were tougher.

We ripped this stuff out by the roots.

Its high-pitched keening wail was above our auditory threshold, but the Hero, a younger Pommes, clearly heard it.

Pommes was all over the stuff, racing through the dark passageways not yet cleared and engaged in mortal kitten combat with the writhing tendrils.

The turf was too tough to break through, but we ripped what we could out of the ground.

We did not know then what we discovered later...

Dominic Rivron, in his response to a comment on his site, called convolvulus hydra-rooted rather than hydra-headed.

This is because, like the Lernaean Hydra of Greek myth, for each head Heracles sliced off, two more heads would appear.

Dominic refers to the fact that as the roots of convolvulus are sliced off, new roots, and, worse, new vegetative bodies appear.

With respect, Dominic, I also think that there is more than a touch of the Gorgon, that breed that numbered the mortal Medusa in its ranks, within convolvulus.

Besides the fearsome, violent nature of the Gorgons, which Gorgons share with convolvulus, I recall that each spilled drop of Gorgon blood that fell to the earth, myth tells us, transformed into a snake.

Back to our field and the rototiller...

Each drop of convolvulus/morning glory root and stalk, left behind after our clearing and bagging of the bodies, was ground into ichor, pulp, paste, and shards by the harsh actions of the rototiller.

And for three days the blood of the downed convolvulus churned in the soil.

For three days your humble scribe laboured to add nutrients and peat and loam and natural fertilizers and air and love into that clay, to make it soil and ripe for growth.

And all that time, the soil roiled with the convulsions of thousands and thousands of vegetative snakes.

Each drop of morning glory blood seized upon that soil's goodness, goodness that we had worked into that soil. Those drops became green tendrils that transmuted our efforts and additions into their growing, snake-like, convolvulus bodies.

Then, one morning, we looked out the window.

It was as if Jack had strewn magic beans, beans picked from the fields of Chernobyl, in our back yard.

A legion of green warriors had sprung up, brandishing their bugles.

I had not intentionally sown dragon's teeth, but the rototiller had torn up the roots that remained... and now you know the result.

Further, unlike Jason, as recounted to us by Appollonius of Rhodes in his Argonauticus, I was not successful at turning these green fiends upon each other.

Jason, myth tells us, flung a stone into the ranks of warriors, grown overnight from sown dragon's teeth. That stone hit the warriors and they quarrelled, fell into disarray, and fought, to the death, amongst and with each other.

But, these vegetative serpents of the earth in our garden had not enough mind to stop and argue.

The stone I cast fell in their midst. But, the legions of convolvulus used it merely to reach higher, and higher, and higher in their quest for light.

We fought them for a week.

We lost.

After a week we gave up and watched the inexorable progress of the Green Man's legions across the lawn. And the house.

The garden-to-be never was, for us.

We eventually had to flee.

First Europe, now Hong Kong.

You do the math...

And be very, very wary of that fearsome foe, convolvulus.

There is no glory in this story.

Morning glory leads only to darkness and woe.

Take care.

Tschuess,
Chris