Convolvulus/
Morning Glory
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| Morning Glories (EKS) |
“Convolvulus” is the term Woolf consistently uses to refer
to what is commonly called morning glory. However there are actually two
different genera bearing this name. Wild
morning glory aka bindweed or creeping jenny, Convolvulus arvensis, is an invasive pest; usually white in color. it
is a perennial, and grows from rhizomes which one site claims grow all the way
to China.[1] The
other more controllable version common in flower gardens belongs to the genus C
ipomoea. While they can grow
prolifically, they tend to be annuals, so return only by seeding; notable
climbers, they come in a much wider range of colors (Ward 268). As Ward points out, in literary usage the
names are often interchanged, and in Shakespeare’s case sometimes confused with
woodbine or honeysuckle (269-70).
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| Convolvulus arvensis (Wikipedia Commons) |
In Woolf’s case, some of her early references seem actually
to be about bindweed, a fairly rare instance of botanical accuracy. Certainly her first three allusions
to the flower variety, in letters of the mid-1920’s, are to the wild
white-flowering weed. In August of 1923,
she wrote to Gerard Brenan about taking one of her solitary walks on the downs “when
suddenly I find I am breaking through myriads of white convolvulus, twined
about the grass, and then I think there are more flowers here than in Spain. .
. . I will write to Gerald when I get home” (L3 65). Perhaps the flowers’ profligacy was also in
her mind two years later, in September of 1925, when she shared a joke with her
sister Vanessa about Duncan Grant: “give my love to old convolvulus bed [Duncan]--
what a perfect description of his voluptuous creamy grace that was to be sure”
(l3 216). The joke is referenced again
in January of 1927, when Woolf sent love to “the old Convolvulus” who was
convalescing in France (L3 318). All of
these appearances suggest the tangled mounds of bindweed and suggestively
connect them to particular men.
It is not nearly as clear what kind of flower Woolf is
conjuring in the 1929 short story, “The Lady in the Looking Glass,” where
convolvulus appears no less than five times, by far the most dense clustering
in any of her writing. Here the flower
is paired repeatedly with traveller’s joy (see CLEMATIS) and is described as
“light and fantastic and leafy and trailing,”; its “elegant sprays” are
“tremulous” and “twine round ugly walls and burst here and there into white and
violet blossoms” (CSF 222). While some varieties of bindweed do bear slightly
purplish flowers, the true deep violets are generally Ipomoea, and bindweed tends to mass rather than trailing leafily up
a wall. The purple color also is not
characteristic of traveller’s joy clematis, which is always white.
The only other mention of convolvulus in Woolf’s fiction is
in Flush, and here she seems to refer
to the cultivated variety. Immured in her upstairs bedroom Elizabeth Barrett sits
in the curtained semi-darkness of an invalid, “the light in summer further
dimmed by ivy, the scarlet runners, convolvuses and nasturtiums which grew in
the window box” (19). I doubt the
invasive, mounding bindweed is planted in this window box, whose vivid
combination of green, red, orange, and perhaps purple suggests the excitement
of the world outside her shaded prison.
In 1940, there is a last mention of the flower in a diary
entry about Quentin Bell who has been out working in the fields; he is “all
corn coloured & red poppied with his blue eyes for convolvulus” (D5 307), a
description of a tan, red-cheeked, blue-eyed farmer that recalls both masculine
associations and the multi-colored window box.
Interestingly, “Convolvulus” is also the name of a variety of hawk-moth,
mentioned in Jacob’s Room as “spinning over the flowers. Orange
and purple, nasturtium and cherry pie” (56), another garden of bright,
contrasting color.
Whatever the taxonomy, Woolf’s impression of convolvulus
remains the same: a twisted, curly, tangled mass of flowers, appropriate to
its meaning in the Victorian language of flowers: “Bonds” (Greenaway 13).
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