Got Purple Creeping Bellflower?
If you have creeping purple bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides), please get rid of it.
This is an ‘uber’ super weed! A ‘Campanula’ gone bad. You don’t want to deal with it as a mature plant and eye to eye and really hard to eliminate. It’s a thug and listed as invasive!
Across Calgary, the purple creeping bellflower has taken over, bullying its way across lawns, into flower beds, along property lines and marches throughout the back alleys.
Photo courtesy Mary Ellen (Mel) Harte, Bugwood.org.
Native to Siberia and Eurasia, it was brought over to North America by some of the first European settlers as a garden flower.
Photo courtesy of Jenn Meredith
Growing quickly in sun and even deep shade, it doesn’t need weeding or watering and is disease resistant. It’s designed to overwhelm other plants.
It’s a very long-lived perennial that flowers for quite a long time producing up to one-meter-long spikes full of flowers that open up at the bottom first. The early emerging leaves look like ground cover with attractive heart-shaped leaves that change to the typical lance-shaped, tooth edged and coarse leafed spike.
Get rid of it. That means lots of digging and sifting often to 30 cm or more to remove lateral roots and taproots. Our heavy clay soil does hinder it somewhat. But, nice loose loam? It just gallops. These tuberous rhizomes are what keeps the plant going even during drought. Just a piece of leP over root? Bingo, new plant.
Keep the plant striped of leaves, cut to the ground, digging out the roots and it will succumb eventually, in spite of its nuclear war shelter of root below. Desperation means chemicals, but this remarkable plant is resistant to some and for a home yard? NOT recommended.
Learn to recognize this plant from its first stages to its belled spikes and get rid of it. Don’t compost. Bag it and place in your black cart!
There’s plenty of literature online about this plant. Check out the City of Calgary about creeping bellflower https://www.calgary.ca/parks/pests/creeping-bellflower.html
Alberta’s Invasive Species Council fact sheet. https://abinvasives.ca/fact-sheet/creeping-bellflower/
There many, beautiful, polite Campanula species for your delectation at garden centres.
