My flower bed runneth over

Last year I came across these purple and red flowers for the first time and I bought three plants. They did VERY WELL. So this year I bought 4 of them. 2 red and 2 purple. I hadn't go a chance to plant them in the beds for a while after I bought them as I don't think I had the beds built at that point. In the pots they yellowed. I finally was able to plant them in this raised bed which is 5' wide. As you will notice they took off & flourished in the bed.

This sturdy and vigorous growers are called VINCA'S. They look a lot like impatiens but the great thing is they grow in the sun and are drought resistant. As any gardener who has impatiens knows that impatiens are shade plants and require a lot of water. I did discover this year that impatiens now have a species that love the sun. Those are called Sunpatiens.

Now another thing I discovered with the vinca's I hadn't last year is they self seed so several plants that I didn't plant grew behind where these were planted and yesterday I found one about 30' away that was growing. One additional interesting thing happened.

I only planted 2 red and 2 purple but when one of them self seeded. I know have this one. WHITE

Vinca's grow about 15-18" tall and say they only 12" but this bed is 5' wide so it definitely grows wider than the 12". Not that I am complaining. Massed together like this in this middle bed the whole 30' length next year will be

VERY colorful. don't you think

I bought some different color seeds for next year. Here are two of them

Now there are two flowers I planted in front of the vincas. the pink ones I forgot the name but they have spread to quadruple what they were in the pot. They hang almost to the bottom of the front of the bed and about 18" wide. The blue ones are lobella. They also did well.

It has been a fun experience seeing how different plants spread and grow. I look forward to next Spring when the bulk of the work will be done and I just have to plant the flowers both annual and perennial I will be starting from seed. I have worked all summer on this backyard but it is coming along nicely.