Many years ago possibly over decades I planted a beautiful waxy ground cover with 3 colors cream, orange, and lime green. This vine has traveled at least 20 feet and will choke any good plant out and kill it.
Since I am now in my 80's female under 5 ft tall need the name of the vine and how to kill it without doing damage to the environment.
The ensuing vine is no longer tri-colored just green. I need help in Northern Illinois. It does die back in the cold.

It's always easier too work from a photo than a description.

There are a number of variegated ivy and vinca thugs... winter creeper... https://www.invasive.org/alien...

And chameleon plant...

always a very bad idea to plant ground covers, and a lot of people have the idea that if they can find the right one, it will crowd out the "weeds" and be maintenance free...

the cure is so much worse that the imagined problem...

Sorry about the yard... I've always attacked these thugs with shovel and mattock when the soil was moist...

In your shoes, you may need to find someone willing to tackle the job...

Be careful... there's a lot of people that would spray hazardous chems, and kill everything, leaving you to live in a super fund site where nothing grows, and it isn't safe to venture outdoors.

Do you know the name? How about a picture?

I would simply spray it with vinegar and salt and while it may not completely kill it it will almost certainly knock it back and keep it at bay. You will probably need to spray it every now and again to keep it down

Where do you think the vinegar and salt will end up?

Especially the salt. It binds to soil particles and causes root death.
Even though it has a bad reputation, glyphosate (Round-up, Ranger Pro, etc.) is safer , for you and the environment and much more effective than those homemade mixes. If they really worked that well and didn't leave residues (except vinegar which dissipates in the soil within minutes) every chemical company in the world would be making hundreds of gallons of it every minute of every day. In order for vinegar to really work it has to be 20 times stronger than anything you can buy in the grocery store and comes with a 'DANGER' label which means it is deadly at 5-50mg/Kg of body weight. Glyphosate has an LD-50 (lethal dose to kill 50% of test animals) of 5600mg/Kg.
There has been no medically proven cancer caused by glyphosate. Personal injury lawsuit maybe, but that's emotional not medical.

Is it possible to just cut it at the ground, even if it's rooted in multiple places? If you can manage that, in spring when it starts to come to life, cut it 1" from the ground and immediately paint the cut stem with the highest concentration of glyphosate you can find. Do not dilute it at all, you need it full strength. If you wait even 5 minutes, the stem will start to callous over and won't absorb the glyphosate. It's absorbed down into the roots this way to kill it. I found a 43% concentrate on Amazon that I still have, it lasts forever done this way.

I've been doing this to get rid of trumpet vine that was growing between daylilies, peonies, hostas and other flowers and it doesn't harm anything else in the soil near it, and these plants are right up next to it, no space between them. I know most try to stay away from harmful chemicals, me included, but doing it this is very targeted and only kills that stem down to the roots where you applied it.

T his?
Fishwort (Houttuynia cordata 'Chameleon')

Before trying to use salt as a weed killer, make sure the plant doesn't happen to be salt tolerant. Then know that all other plants that are intolerant of salty soil will be unable to grow in that spot for years.

If it is just rooted in one place, which I doubt, cut its stem at ground level and dab that cut with glyphosate or any undiluted weed killer. The small amount needed will have minimal environmental effect.

mrwwandmrs said: It does die back in the cold.

I think I'd use a string trimmer or hedge trimmers (using a grass mower risks rocks or roots damaging the blade) to cut it close to the ground now-
And then immediately cover the whole patch with thick black plastic, anchored on all sides by dirt or rocks or long sticks or lumber.
In the spring, leave the plastic on in an attempt to starve out the patch- for as long as it takes. No sunlight means no photosynthesis which means no energy for the roots.
I use roundup carefully when needed, but it needs to be used when the plant is not dormant, or as it's just going dormant, so I think it might be too late this fall to have much effect with it.

If it were spring now, I'd use the same procedure, but maybe spray with something like 'burnout' right after trimming, then cover with black plastic.

Maybe others on the board have done this?

That will work if there is nothing left that you want to keep. The way I got rid of Chamaeleon Plant was the hard way. Digging up big chunks and removing every bit of rhizome I could find. Anything that it had grown through got bare-rooted and cleaned out. What. A. Job! It still took about a year to get all of it. Fortunately it wasn't that big a patch, but still. The Dwarf Plumbago was a similar chore. Live and plant and learn.