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Simply Gardening
by Doug Green
Singing the Blues

Jan. 11, 2000 -- While I have been listening to B.B. King this morning while I write this column, the blues have nothing to do with music. No sir. Instead, I’m thinking of the Campanula family of perennial flowers that grace almost every one of my varied gardens. It is a large family, some 250 different species, and thrives in just about every place I’d want to put them which is why they’re all over the place at home. I love them because most of them thrive in either sun or part shade and in my sandy soils or heavier ones. They propagate easily from seed and in fact can become a nuisance weed if left unchecked. While blue is the predominant colour in the mix, some forms do come in white, pink and shades of mauve. Many of these plants are readily available at garden centres or specialty nurseries so keep this column around while you plant hunt this spring.

Now, somebody is sure to ask what the real name of this plant is. It most often goes by the common name of bellflower but I’ve heard it called other things as well. The difficulty, as you’ll shortly see, is that there’s so many of them that if we call them all Bellflower, we’ll be hopelessly mixed up trying to sort them out. I’ve put the common name that I know them by in parenthesis after their real name.

My front gardens have several forms of the Campanula persificolia (Peach Leaved Bellflower) in varying shades of blue and white. This plant thrives in the dry soils of the driveway border as well as the richer soils of the main perennial garden. In the richer areas with good irrigation, it has become a bit of a weed. It self sows here and there and I’m constantly weeding it out. At 30 inches tall and not requiring any staking, the blue spikes cheer me up in mid-summer when they bloom along with my pink roses.

My rock gardens were originally the home for C. carpatica (Carpathian Harebell) a short blue form that never got taller than 12 inches. This wonderful little plant blooms from the end of June right through until September and earns its way in the garden. Unfortunately, it decided it didn’t like the rock garden and self sowed itself over to the shady garden where it thrives quite happily in the moist, rocky soil of the pathways next to the good garden beds. Growing in the pathways is fine with me - it doesn’t take up garden space and it seems quite happy. As long as I weed the volunteers out every spring, I can keep it within bounds.

Now, the rock gardens hold several different forms of C. garganica. (Gargano Bellflower) This dwarf plant, never growing more than 6 inches tall, is a fantastic bloomer with its huge star shaped flowers of gorgeous sky blue. It’s a mid-summer bloomer and well worth the price you’ll pay for it. A cultivar, ‘Dickson’s Gold’ has bright, golden-green leaves for most of the summer covered by bright blue flowers in mid-summer. This is a particularly nice form and if you can find one at your garden centre, buy it for the rock garden or front of your perennial border.

I saw that a local nursery was selling C. takesimana (Korean Bellflower) and wondered to myself who would be the next victim of this plant. It is advertised as doing well in dry shade and it does so with elegance. Just don’t let it out of the dry shade or it will put on the gas and occupy most of your garden within a few years. This particular Bellflower spreads by underground stolons as well as seed and once established in a garden is not easily discouraged or eliminated. It is lovely to look at but an invasive plant to avoid.

One form that does extremely well in reasonably deep shade under deciduous trees is C. poscharskyana (I don’t want to pronounce it either but you can try Serbian Bellflower instead.) This 6 inch tall spreading plant makes a wonderful mat of intense bright blue starry flowers. Catalogues describe it as “spreading fairly quickly” so you know that it too is a garden thug. Luckily it spreads by seeds, not underground, so is relatively easy to weed out when it ultimately gets where you don’t want it. I once saw a lovely show of this Bellflower peeking out of the cracks of a rock stairway. The owner allowed it to live in the cracks (where it thrived) but weeded it out of the rest of the good garden beds. I like this thug.

The last one I’ll leave you with is the C. grandiflora or Canterbury Bells. This large flowering form comes in a wide range of blues, whites and pinks and thrives just about anywhere in the garden. Well, just about anywhere, it didn’t like dry, sandy soils in my garden area. It is a biennial (the plant dies after flowering) so in order to maintain it in your garden, you have to let it self-sow and not weed out the seedlings every spring. You can help it along by waiting until the seed pods turn dark brown and then collect them. I crush the seed heads and spread the tiny brown seeds around on the garden where I want to establish them and then leave nature to do its best. This technique, by the way, is guaranteed to work with any of the family members.

There are other species wandering around (one nurseryman boast that his collection is over 100 species) but these are the main garden forms you’ll find in garden centres this coming spring. You don’t have to be sad to sing the blues and you won’t be when you add Campanula to your garden song.

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