As a gardener, I’ll admit to harboring ill will toward some of the plants that crop up in the flower beds I’m tending. There is only so much shot weed you can pull without also wanting to pull out your own hair.

On the other hand, as someone with an expensive college degree in herbal sciences, I also tend to give a smidgen of leeway to many of the native and introduced medicinal plants I find while weeding. Some of those don’t end up in the compost bin quite as readily as their fellows. In fact, I will sometimes make a mental note of their location and return later to harvest them.

Still, there are a few plants — a very few! — I just wish would find a black hole and jump in.

Take for instance vinca. The name sounds so innocent, like something you’d name a tiny Russian puppy with enormous, soulful eyes. The same with its common name, periwinkle. Who could hate such a sweet-sounding thing with such a cute, little flower?

Well, I, for one.

There was a patch of vinca planted over the lids to the septic tank when we moved into our home many years ago. It took me forever to finally eradicate it. Even after I thought I’d found the last little creeping root, another wee plant would pop up. It was like that Whack-A-Mole game at the arcade.

Vinca major (greater periwinkle) and Vinca minor (lesser periwinkle) are Old World introductions that are primarily used as ground covers. In other words, they’re intended to cover a multitude of sins in the landscape. The problem is they can easily morph into a fiasco that quickly outstrips the original dilemma they were planted to solve.

Vinca will cover up that bald spot in the landscape you’re trying to fill in and it will do it effortlessly and without work on your part. Then it will take over your flower beds, spread into the lawn, creep up onto the deck and turn each of your planters into a solid mass of vinca roots.

That laugh you hear at night will be the vinca plotting a hostile takeover of your entire landscape, maybe the known world.

It’s a member of the Apocynaceae, or dogbane, family, many of whose members are poisonous. Looking at it, however, you might not at first imagine it’s related to oleander, plumeria and those horrifically spiny Pachypodium trees found in Madagascar.

Just say no to vinca, I’m begging you. It’s like putting a shark in the bathtub with the kids. Simple as that.

I know I shouldn’t take umbrage at a plant. They’re just doing what they were created to do, after all. At least I’m not alone in holding a grudge against some things green and leafy. As President George H.W. Bush famously proclaimed in 1990 when he banned it from both the White House and Air Force One, “I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!’’

Hey, George, I’ll trade ya some vinca for your broccoli.