WILD MORNING-GLORY.
Convolvulus luteolus, Gray. Morning-Glory Family.
Stems.—Twining and climbing twenty feet or more. Leaves.—Alternate; sagittate; two inches or so long; smooth. Peduncles.—Several-flowered; axillary, with two small linear-lanceolate bracts a little below the flower. Flowers.—Cream-color or pinkish, sometimes deep rose. Sepals.—Five; without bracts immediately below them. Corolla.—Open funnel-form; eighteen lines long; not lobed or angled. Stamens.—Five. Ovary.—Globose; two-celled or imperfectly four-celled. Style filiform. Stigmas two. Hab.—Throughout California.
I remember long stretches of mountain road where the wild morning-glory has completely covered the unsightly shrubs charred by a previous year's fire, flinging out its slender stems, lacing and interlacing them in airy festoons, which are covered with the fragile flowers in greatest profusion. In these tangles, the industrious spiders have hung their exquisite geometrical webs, which catch the glittering water-drops in their meshes. When the sun comes out after a dense, cool fog-bath on a summer morning, nothing more charmingly fresh could be imagined than such a scene.
[RATTLE-WEED—Astragalus leucopsis.]
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The common morning-glory of the south—C. occidentalis, Gray—is very similar to the above, but may be distinguished from it by the pair of large, thin bracts immediately below the calyx and enveloping it.
Another very pretty species is C. villosus, Gray. This is widely distributed, but not very common. Its trailing stems and foliage are of a velvety sage-gray throughout, and its small flowers of a yellowish cream-color. The hastate leaves are shapely, and the whole plant is charming when grown away from dust.
The common European bindweed—C. arvensis, L.—is to the farmer a very unwelcome little immigrant. In fields it becomes a serious pest; for the more its roots are disturbed and broken up the better it thrives. But despite its bad character, we cannot help admiring its pretty little white funnels, which lift themselves so debonairly among the prostrate stems and leaves.
In medicine a tincture of the whole plant is valued for several uses.