Creeping Myrtle

Robert Adams
2 minutes ago
2 min read

CREEPING MYRTLE IS A GROUND COVER that has always appealed to me.

In early May, small light-blue flowers suddenly appear on thin stems between the waxy-green leaves. Each flower has five petals that seem to smile up at you, announcing that spring has finally arrived. It is the leaves' evergreen nature and spreading growth habit that make them desirable in the right spot.

In my youth, wooded lots in my developing neighborhood, soon to be transformed into two-story houses with sodded lawns, often had sizable patches of this ground cover found under towering woodland trees.

I recall digging up small clumps of myrtle and placing the entangled roots, stems, and flowers in my sister’s little red pull-wagon to be transported to my home. My mother would then plant them in her gardens. There were also white and purple violets that seemed to live amongst the myrtle, adding to the magical display as the woodland plants prospered in their new home.

This memory helped me with a landscape project I undertook at my dear Nancy’s Traverse City Victorian home, a couple of years ago. The original plantings of blue-eyed grass, intended to serve as a landscape border at the base of her white picket fence, were struggling. Too much shade and too little water became my analysis of the condition they faced.

It soon dawned on me that patches of myrtle were abundant in my best friend's next-door wooded lot, which could serve as a nursery for the replacement and upgrade to Nancy’s landscape.

So, with my trusty wood-veneer bushel basket and shovel in hand, I began gathering clumps of myrtle from the dense floor in the woods next to my friend’s house, much like I had seventy years earlier.

We are moving into the third spring after transplanting the roots and stolons of myrtle along the base of the fence. I am happy to report that they have happily adapted and expanded their presence; they are beginning to form the dense evergreen mat that nature seems to express.

Mission accomplished.

In my reading, I unearthed an excellent, well-researched article in Southern Living with an in-depth story of the periwinkle (myrtle) family.

https://www.southernliving.com/periwinkle-7197673