Botanists know it as hedge bindweed, Calystegia sepium. My grandmother, who struggled to restrict its incursions into her flower borders, called it the devil’s guts. I may have inherited it from her, embedded in the root ball of a day lily that I took from her garden as a memento.
Hedge bindweed regenerates from the smallest root fragments. I’ve dug out yards of its brittle underground stems, which resemble white worms and exude milky latex when broken. William Withering, the 18th-century physician who discovered the medicinal properties of foxglove and was always on the lookout for other therapeutic native plants, advocated these as an alternative to scammony, a violent purgative extracted from roots of a related Middle Eastern species, and used to expel tapeworms. His patients must surely have wondered whether he had let loose the devil in their own guts.
