CuttingBackII

These two weeds, both introductions from Europe and considered noxious weeds in Utah, are Bryony (Bryonia alba) and Field Bindweed or Wild Morning-glory (Convolvulus arvensis). Both are invasive, ferocious consumers of precious water in this semi-arid area, and maddening when it comes to control. They can strangle even a tree to death, as they did some years ago a good-sized Hawthorne on our east-facing hill.

Bryony (Bryonia alba)
I thought the kids and I discovered a weird kind of Utah grape in 1970 (sketch shown at below left) when we first came upon this vine. It was draped over everything from the size of a thistle to mature trees on our east-facing hill, working its way upward and hanging on by its many tendrils, like grape vines. We were disabused of this idea at the end of the season when the green pea-sized fruit turned black. At the time of this discovery, we were cleaning a largish area right below the house of an amazing amount of junk.

Many years before, when the road below us came along the top of the cut bank, the succeeding families living here used this hidden piece of waste land as a refuse dump. It was hardly noticeable in summer -- the cans, medicine bottles, broken tools, discarded barbed wire, and other oddments were blanketed with yards and yards of these grape-sized leaves, but it looked fairly awful in the spring after the snow melted. It looked awful after the first frost, too, when the vines turned into a wiry mass with the glint of trash showing through from below.

We found at once that we couldn't pull the vines up by their roots with our hands or with a trowel or dandelion fork. My daughter, Ethy, went back and got a shovel. When Ethy succeeded in digging up the first root -- the home base of a magnificent carpet of vines, leaves, and berries -- we were astounded to discover the thing exceeded the size of a soccer ball. From then on the contest was on to see who among the kids could dig up the biggest Bryony root.

The contest continued until two of them went off to college and eventual marriage and still the Bryony persists. Harold Perryman of Four Seasons Yard Care is shown in the photo, above right, pulling Bryony out of an old lilac. He and his Bryony (Bryonia alba) Holmgren and Andersen, Utah Agricultural Esperiment Station, Logan, Utah

Bryony (Bryonia alba) Holmgren and Andersen, Utah Agricultural Esperiment Station, Logan, Utah

sons now carry on the battle against this, the second most awful of The Terrible Two.

The vines propogate easily through dispersal via bird droppings, which is why these plants so often appear under trees and tall shrubs and along fence lines. They thrive under our big spruces and firs on the hill and can get to a huge size before we notice them -- usually in the winter after the plant's leaves wither and hang like shredded paper against the green of the trees. The birds appear to have no compunction over eating these deadly-looking berries. And it's said that goats will eat them, too. In humans, they are said to be emetic, often poisonous, especially to children, and of an acrid and unpleasant flavor. Nevertheless the berries are not so acrid and poisonous at the juice of the root.

I'm fairly certain that at least one of the Four Seasons crew – Perryman Senior – has suffered some eye irritation from his hands coming into contact with the juice in these roots and later brushing at his face or rubbing an eye. A couple of small specimens of these roots are shown shown below, at right; one is cut in half.

Bryony vine (Bryonia alba), flowers,
fruit, and tendrils.
Holmgren and Anderson
USU Agricultural Experiment Station

Our type of Bryony, the black-berried, European type, is described by Mrs. M. Grieve in 1931 (in A Modern Herbal, see below in listed books) as containing the glucoside, Brein, a tincture of which was considered useful for various ills including bronchitis and urinary tract problems. She appends the recipe for this concoction. The root, however, is also described by Mrs. Grieve as poisonous and, speaking as one who has cut many of them open with a shovel in digging them up, they smell poisonous, too, and I wouldn't be caught dead stewing up a tincture of Brein for anyone.

Nevertheless, in the fourteenth century the Bryony root, at that time named "Wild Nep," was considered a cure for Leprosy. It was used by the Greeks and Romans as a purgative and cathartic, and later given as a purgative to horses and cattle (one pound of the root boiled in water, take note). I was glad to read that by 1931 all these practices had mostly fallen out of favor. Bryony roots

Even a small part of a Bryony root left in the ground will soon sprout a new Bryony vine. Even out of the soil and into the fresh air they're appallingly resilient – dumped in a pile in the middle of a waste area, the roots will live on and sprout robust vines that spread in all directions. Putting them into the compost heap would lead to disaster.

I've found that scattering the unearthed roots on the graveled road that leads into the alfalfa field and beating them into pieces with a shovel does the trick, but they've got to be left in place, then, to dry out. Running back and forth over the pieces with the tractor is not only satisfying, but smashes what's left into near powder. I imagine grinding them in a chipper might work the same way, if one has a chipper that works – ours is perennially on the blink. Last spring I put several Bryony roots in the back of the golf cart I use to get around the place and left them there to dry up, but these were smaller specimens, and I still chopped them up with the shovel for good measure before dumping them.

One thing we discovered immediately – repeated applications of herbicide is not only costly and time consuming, but completely ineffective except on seedling-sized vines. And the seedlings can be more easily pulled up if noticed early enough in the season.

Field Bindweed is a serious pest in cultivated fields in Utah's Cache Valley and all across the United States and Canada. Owing to its piggy-backing in grain shipments from Europe and the British Isles, the weed has also penetrated as far south as Australia. It's found thriving in the Himalayas, in the former Soviet Union, and in Asia. In the United States, its arrival on the east coast on ships from Europe led inevitably to a westward trek with settlers and railway shipments of grain. A few settlers actually planted Bindweed as ornamentals and cover crops. By the late 1800s it could be found in every part of the United States.

A paper published by the Department of Agriculture of Western Australia¹ reports that stems grow there to six feet or more and the taproot penetrates 10 or more feet below ground. The plant spreads by lateral, underground rhizomes that resemble spaghetti which in turn send roots vertically to collect below into what some workers in the field call taproots and others call a large mass of whitish, knobby rhizomes, some of them quite thick. This latter configuration seems to conjure up one of its more unsavory common names, "Devil's Guts."

In the western United States, roots of the Bindweed can pentrate down to 20 to 30 feet in soil loose enough to allow it. And in a study reported by Larry Mitch of the Weed Science Society of America² it was found that bindweed roots and rhizomes combined in a hectare (2.47 acres) of infested land can reach 5600 to 11,200 kg (12,320 to 24,640 lbs). This amount of vegetation can suck up a prodigious amount of moisture in rain-poor western and midwestern lands.

Above, Bindweed (Convolulus arvensis),
leaves, stems, and
lateral and vertical roots
Holmgren and Anderson,
USU Agricultural Experiment Station

Several years ago, I saw an approximately three-hundred square foot infestation of bindweed in a grain field near here, in the northern end of Utah's Cache Valley, that was subsequently treated with the herbicide, Banvel^TM. Banvel^TM is a powerful eradicator containing the active ingredient Dicamba (present as diglycolamine salt). The owner of the field must have really soaked the Bindweed with this herbicide because the spot was bare for one entire season and for two seasons following when the rest of the field was producing a fairly decent grain crop. Then, driving past that same field a couple of years later, when the grain had come back on the bare spot, I saw the umistakable and insidious green of Bindweed growing robustly under and up the stalks of the then ripening grain – a development which must have discouraged the farmer, whoever he was, but was due to the vast reservoir of nutrients many feet below.

Bindweed vines can and do nearly smother shrubs and small trees and grab onto the host, not with tendrils, but with the twisting vines themselves. Mrs. Grieve says a Bindweed stem will make a complete revolution in about one and a half hours. It then waves around until it finds something perpendicular -- very often another Bindweed stem -- to wrap itself around.

Mrs. Grieve has little to say in her herbal about its use in medicine, though one author in another paper mentions that in India it is used as a purgative, and in the first century, an herbalist named Dioscorides recommended drinking tea from the seed to cure spleen probems, weariness, and hiccups. In the first century "spleen" referred to temperament. Too much spleen indicated a disposition quick to anger. So evidently the concoction was taken to calm one down. However, the side effects included urinating blood starting on the 6th day of drinking this tea and making one permanently sterile after the 37th², and I can only hope the herbalist made these side effects clear to his patients.

Here at dragongoose farm we have three methods of dealing with bindweed in our flower beds – the "starve the root" method, the herbicide method, and the plastic cover method. None of them have so far come close to eradicating the weed, but I'll tell you about them anyway.
Starving

Starving the root is the idea behind the method I heard described by our USU Extension Agent, Lorelie -----. She said some farmers have managed to eradicate the weed by tilling the field every ten days. "If they're persistent enough, " she said, "in two or three years the Bindweed's gone." I wish I'd asked her how many farmers managed to keep up this ten-day tilling schedule for two or three years and still got their cows milked. I'll bet not many. Our starve the root method consists of pulling or hoeing up the vines, raking them into piles, and carrying them away – continually. One-time tilling, I should mention, invites disaster. The roots, cut into small pieces by the tiller, will each sprout a new plant and what you wind up with is a veritable blanket of vines.

I had a bad infestation of Bindweed against the foundation in front of our parlor windows a few years ago. The growth was far enough away from the 'Earth Song' roses ranged in front of it that I could get away with spraying the vines with a mixture of Roundup^TM (Glyphosate) and 2,4-D. I used a hand spray bottle and really soaked them with it and it actually knocked them out – in the other direction. The Bindweed now flourishes in the middle of the bed – under and through the 'Meideland Alba' groundcover roses planted there. It twists through the Campanula and Soapwort along the front, too, though the thick mat of violets (Viola odorata) seems to stop it on the southwest corner of the bed. Each spring I cut the groundcover roses down to about six or eight inches from the ground. If the Bindweed came up early enough, I could probably give it the death spray at that time, but alas it waits until the roses are thickly arching throughout the bed.

A friend of mine told me he'd got rid of the Bindweed in his small Logan garden by pulling the vines out from under the plants and running them through his rubber-gloved hands after dipping them in a mixture of herbicide. I've tried this on a few spots, killing quite a bit of lawn and a couple of lilies in the process. My gloves dripped, and I don't see how one can avoid this. Also, a bucket of herbicide right next to a flower bed is so vulnerable to being knocked over, it gave me the horrors the whole time I was doing it.

After reading Sarah Stein's Noah's Garden some years ago, I decided we should follow her example and plant a wild-animal and bird friendly copse in our rather big northernmost lawn. I worked out a slightly serpentine path in the middle of the trees and shrubs I planted there, covered it with heavy weight black plastic, and covered the plastic with shredded bark, renewing it each season. I left it covered for perhaps four years and decided two years ago to take it up. What I discovered underneath was a flourishing mass of whitish, spaghetti-like roots that no doubt was the fountainhead of the Bindweed vines we were constantly hoeing out on either side of the path. Perhaps clear plastic, uncovered, might have done better at suffocating the stuff, though it would not have presented a very sylvan picture while it lay there. A strip of clear plastic does do a tolerable job of killing out lawn grass for the purpose of enlarging a bed without resorting to herbicide, and I've done that a couple of times. Messy looking, though.