In the following centuries, many subspecies, varieties, and synonymous taxa were discovered and described as purportedly new species in places including China, Russia, Egypt, and Morocco.

[citation needed] New species and forms were described as far as Chile, Mexico, and the state of California when botanists encountered the plant there,[2][3] although it is not native to these areas.

[5] In the Flora of Great Britain and Ireland (2009), Peter Derek Sell described nine new forms he believed he had discovered in Cambridgeshire, along Fen Road in the village of Bassingbourn cum Kneesworth.

[5] Plants are typically found inhabiting farmland,[5][7][12] waste places,[5][7][13] along roads,[5][12][13] in pastures,[12][13] grassy slopes,[5] and also along streams in North America.

It is a characteristic species in the phytosociological vegetation association Convolvulo-Agropyretum, belonging to the couch grass dry grasslands alliance (called Convolvulo-Agropyrion repentis in syntaxonomy).

These are specialists (oligolectic) feeding upon the flowers of these plants, possessing unusual modifications of the scopa, such that almost the entire abdomen (including the dorsal surface) is used for carrying pollen, rather than the legs, as in most bees.

[14] Species of Systropha in central Europe (such as S. curvicornis and S. planidens, both uncommon bees) are essentially entirely dependent upon C. arvensis.

The males of both species claim territories consisting of a patch of bindweed flowers, perching on the flowers in the afternoon after a regular patrol of their little patch for errant conspecific males, which, upon countenance, they proceed to attack the intruder by ramming him from the air with a specialised protuberance on their lower abdomen.

[18] In North America it can become the or a co-dominant plant in specific habitats: the low vegetation found around vernal pools in Sacramento County, and around large pools in Tehama County, California; riparian corridors in Wyoming and Colorado; aspen stands and mountain-mahogany (Cercocarpus spp.)

[19] In some nature parks, it is commonly found in areas of disturbed soil, such as camp grounds or around horse corrals in California.

Employees for the same organisation also reported that it was a significant weed on an irrigated plot of farmland in northern Idaho where native bunchgrass and forbs were cultivated, insofar that it caused "decreasing biodiversity" on the land.

[19] Bindweed contains several alkaloids which are toxic for mice, including pseudotropine, and lesser amounts of tropine, tropinone, and meso-cuscohygrine.

[23] Although it produces attractive flowers, it is often unwelcome in gardens as a nuisance weed due to its rapid growth and choking of cultivated plants.

[9] Methods for controlling bindweed include: In one of the tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Our Lady's Little Glass, this flower is used by Mary, mother of Jesus, to drink wine with when she helps free a wagoner's cart.