(I finally finished the garden.)

The heart-shaped leaves and large, blowsy white flowers of the bindweed can make it appear rather attractive to a gardening novice, but ignore it at your peril. 

Spend a couple of weekends carelessly sipping a good Barolo whilst enjoying the warmth of the sun on your shoulders and you will pay for your complacency.

You might have thought it innocuous, or even charming, but the bindweed has a determined agenda: to survive, propogate, and take over whatever space is on offer, entirely to serve its own purposes.

Whilst you were basking in blissful ignorance, the bindweed was establishing a robust system of confusing, riddled roots beneath your feet, perfectly designed to secure its existence and prevent its eradication.

This network of underground roots can stretch for miles, linking together seemingly unrelated herbage in a single-minded, common purpose.

The bindweed doesn't care for your garden, or the plants you choose to grow within it.

The bindweed wants your garden, and the space your plants occupy, for itself. 

If you leave it to its own devices, unchallenged and unchecked, you will walk outside one day soon and see only heart-shaped leaves and large, blowsy white flowers, stretching into the distance, endlessly repeating. 

And for every leaf and flower you destroy, several more of the same will spring up to replace them - until even your very house is tightly bound and uniformly covered.

So perhaps it's best to start now, striking at the root.

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil for every one who is striking at the root." (H. D. Thoreau)