Last summer, my garden nemesis was hedge bindweed - convolcullius sepium - a simple climbing or twining vine in the morning glory family, with alternate heart-shaped leaves and small white flowers, a calix and five sepals or small bristles.

While my back was turned, bindweed twined itself around my roses, lilac, tomatoes, evergreen, and a pear tree. Strictly speaking, my back wasn't turned. The vine spread through the lilac and pear tree branches under my delighted eye. I thought the rich green was lilac and pear leaves and that the growth was handsome. Then I left town for three weeks. When I returned, there were seedpods everywhere, two to three inches long, smooth, bright green pods nestled among the deep August dark green foliage.

I was ruthless. I spent a weekend tearing out the vines. I dug deep with my pitchfork to get at string-like roots that stretched down into compact clay soil. I unwrapped vines from rose thorns and pine needles and almost ripe pears. I yanked and unwound and, in desperation, cut into tangles at the centers and tips of my trees and bushes. I clutched at seedpods, tore them from the vines, and obsessively thrust every one of them, together with the roots, into the trash dumpster (violating the ban on yard waste).

In August, these seedpods are compact cases, soft, shaped like tiny bananas, holding undeveloped green seeds, maybe a hundred to a pot, each attached by a thin cord to the top of the pod. The vines are sturdy, and so are the roots, thin white chords without any hairlike tendrils to help break up the hardpan soil. I compost virtually everything - but not bindweed roots and seedpods.

Late Sunday afternoon I sat back on my heels and sighed with relief. The bindweed was gone, all of it. That was August. Although I thought I kept a wary watch, in November, when the leaves fell, I saw a string of seedpods across the top of my apricot tree, another running down the goldenrod, and more hardening on the fences. Again I grabbed them off the dying vines, pitching them into the dumpster. By now the pods were brown, still soft tight packages, but beginning to form a bumpy crust and, inside, turning white as they dried around the green seed.

Then, in January, deep in my Nanking cherry bushes and out in the open on my back shed, hanging on the telephone wire, and, despite my vigilance, draped on the lilac, were dried hedge bindweed pods, their withered shells looking like elongated walnuts. The casings had a crisp crackle to them, but they were still flexible, resilient to the freeze and thaw, designed to keep seed safe till spring. Again, I tore them off their supports and threw them away. But this time I paused first to admire their shape and the line of their drapery on the bare branches, wood, and wire. I brought one inside to open at my desk.

The inside of the ripe pod was creamy mother-of-pearl, shaped like a candle flame. The seeds, packed tight, were brown and almost flat, like bits of pencil shavings - but each one with a shining white down parachute, sturdier than dandelion fluff, an aerodynamic design to propagate the seed, floating it far and wide from the mother pod. I probed the pod, tipping its contents onto my desk to count 84 seeds. They scattered as I counted and spread their silky strands of angel hair, propelled by a breath of draft to the soil of the jade plant on my desk and the begonia by the window. No doubt some rested in the windowsill crack and, when I raised the storms months later, blew back out into the garden on the April breeze.

Learn more about this author, Mary Ann Mcgivern.
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