One trouble about gardening is planting without knowing the characteristics of the plant.

I fell in love at first sight and bought this “beautiful” tiny plant with attractive neon green leaves a year ago and planted it on the ground. I was happy with it all spring and summer until I noticed it was spreading and had extending runners. Once the runners touch the ground, it roots and form another plant. It’s spreading!!

So I removed it from the ground and discovered that the roots had already spread. I dug them out and moved some in the pot.

Now, it’s spring, I noticed that it’s back growing profusely. It’s scary! Even though it’s a beautiful plant but too much and too many of them spreading and invading other plants is a terrible sight.

I had a similar experience with mint. When we moved in our house, the garden was bare. My friend, a gorgeous Japanese lady, gifted me a container garden with beautiful flowers for our front door and a few cuttings of mint to plant in the ground.

After a few months, those innocent mint cuttings turned into a colony! Although they smell awesome, they are choking my roses and they started sprouting all over the space. I uprooted them and moved some of it to the rocky and not very favorable side of the garden for plants to grow. And guess what. It made a colony there again despite the condition. I had to uproot them and contain them in a pot.

Now, I still see them sprung from the ground from time to time and I just uproot them right away.

With this “beautiful” neon-green colored plant, which I found out to be ground ivy/creeping Charlie, also called grecoma in Japan, the trouble of digging them out has just began. But it looks like I can’t stop it from spreading since it has spread to areas I can hardly reach :-(.

Oh, well. I don’t know what to do.