Creeping Myrtle

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

In early May, small light purple-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 garden spot.

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

I recall digging up small clumps of myrtle and placing the tangled roots, stems, and flowers in my sister’s little red pull-wagon. I would transport them to my home, where my mother would then plant them in her gardens.

There ​were also white and purple violets that came in the patches of 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 a couple of years ago at my dear Nancy’s Victorian home in Traverse City. 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 wood-veneer bushel basket and trusty shovel in hand, I began gathering clumps of myrtle from the dense floor in the woods, much like I had seventy years earlier. It wasn't quite as easy collecting the clumps as I remembered.

We are now 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 adapted and expanded their presence; they are beginning to form the dense evergreen mat in which nature intended.

Mission accomplished.

In my reading, I unearthed an excellent Southern Living article with an in-depth story of the Periwinkle (Myrtle) family.