Avoid Planting This Beautiful Flower In Your Garden Or You'll Soon Regret It

In the name of beauty, convenience, or fear of missing out, most gardeners at one time or another have unwittingly grown an invasive plant. Sometimes we're charmed by a colorful foundation plant or the promise of great fall color. Other times we want to avoid disappointing a neighbor that insists on sharing their vigorously growing perennials with us. With creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides), onlookers are enchanted by 2- to 3-foot spikes of blue-purple, bell-shaped flowers.

But the love usually ends there — creeping bellflower is one of those stunning flowers you'll immediately regret growing in your yard and garden. These plants — invasive in parts of the US and Canada — have roots that will strangle neighboring plants, which, for most of us, is reason enough to consider creeping bellflower as one of the invasive plants you should never grow. Once they are in your yard, removing them can be a struggle. These plants have developed a resistance to certain herbicides, they easily self-seed, and even the tiniest root fragment can grow into a new plant. To eradicate them, gardeners must painstakingly uproot entire plants.

Some gardeners unknowingly add this flower to their yards as it's sometimes included in wildflower seed mixes. Forewarned gardeners can avoid purchasing nursery grown plants or accepting giveaways from friends or neighbors. But unless you know what to look for, you may think you're buying a safe lookalike, when in fact you're about to purchase an invasive.

If you have stumbled upon a patch of flowers and want to know if they are the invasive species in question, inspect the stems and flowers. Creeping bellflower blooms are purplish blue and bell-shaped, hanging on flower spikes, with blooms opening from bottom to top. The plant starts as a low-growing mound with heart-shaped leaves, but as the flower stalk grows, the leaves higher on the plant become more lance-shaped. Two more telltale signs to look for are the leaves, which have toothed edges and hairy bottoms.

For those avoiding adding creeping bellflower to the garden, there are many substitutes which don't have that invasive's unfriendly disposition. Among the blue-flowered alternatives, there are many US native penstemons, beautiful long-blooming perennial plants you can easily grow from seed. Another option with blue blooms is blue mirror delphinium (Delphinium grandiflorum 'Blue Mirror'), a non-native ornamental that is not invasive. Or, if you're looking for a plant with eye-catching flower spikes, try blazing star (Liatris spicata), a favorite of hummingbirds.