I love deep, saturated, shiny jewel tones. I guess it’s obvious that I grew up in the ’80s!
So a decade or so ago when I discovered vinca, I was in love! The smooth, gleaming, dark green leaves look expertly tailored and classy no matter the season. Early spring brings equally perfect looking violet flowers that come, then disappear with no messy pile of dead petals to clean up.
Vinca loves sun and shade and flourishes in the clay soil that covers our yard. It also seems to tolerate heat and dry soil pretty well, too. Sometimes it gets a little wilted looking in the heat of a July day, but perks right up once the sun goes down or after a bit of watering.
I started with vinca in the back yard around our deck. Very little sun reaches that area and after years of trying other plants, with very little success, vinca was the answer to my prayers. It spreads quickly and grows so densely that it is difficult for weeds to get a foothold. As I mentioned earlier, it always looks perfectly manicured, so it gave the deck the finished, cared for look I was had been trying to achieve.
I then decided to plant some vinca in the garden along the back fence as a way to tamp down on weeds and keep moisture in the soil so that the other plants had a better chance of growing. Finally, when the large pine tree in our front yard had to come down due to old age and needle blight, I decided to plant some vinca again as a ground cover to help the newly created sun garden.
So why I have spent a large part of this spring pulling my beloved vinca out of my front garden?
Not only does the vinca make it difficult for weeds to grow, it also starts choking out just about everything else around it. While that was a good thing around my deck because it is too shady for most things to grow, it is becoming a problem in the front garden where a lot of things could grow if they weren’t being attacked by the beautiful, graceful vinca.
Spending hours carefully untangling and uprooting the vinca from the plants I would like to keep has given me plenty of time to think. And I think that vinca is a lot like a lot of good things in my life that need to be kept in their proper place.
For instance, food is a wonderful thing, but if not kept in its proper place, it can destroy my life through obesity which can lead to diabetes, heart disease and a whole lot of other problems. Food, like the vinca around my deck, is a very important, necessary, beautiful part of my life. But it needs to stay in its proper space.
Thank you, vinca, for the great object lesson!
"Most Likely to Succeed" 