5 easy steps to healthy and colourful campanula

Campanulas, or bellflowers, are beloved for their blue, violet, pink, white and purple bell-shaped blossoms. Here's how to make them an essential part of your garden.

• Carpathian bellflower, good to Zone 4, does exactly what a good rock garden flower should do. It produces large blossoms on petite, low-growing plants.
• The cultivars 'Blue Clips' and 'White Clips' mix well with yellow-flowered sedums, sun rose and many other small rock garden plants.
• A more upright campanula that seldom fails is milky bellflower, which produces softly rounded spikes of lilac flower clusters in midsummer.
• Peachleaf bellflower produces very large, upward-facing blossoms on 0.6 metre (two foot) stems.
• Serbian or Dalmatian bellflower produces underground runners that quickly establish a low clump, only a few inches high but several feet wide.
• Another heat-resistant species is the clustered bellflower. It's an upright plant that grows from 0.3 to one metre (one to three feet) tall.

• Campanulas are among the most care-free and finest flowers for perennial borders and rock gardens.
• Team them up with iris, foxglove, peonies and perennial geraniums in mixed borders.
• Varieties that hug the ground are invaluable for the rich hues their flowers bring to rock gardens.

• Campanulas are easy to grow.. Your climate or planting site should offer cool nights to offset the warm days of summer.
• Campanulas respond dramatically to fertile, well-drained soil.
• To plant campanulas, dig in a five centimetre (two inch) blanket of good compost before setting out new plants.
• Set out plants in the early spring and space them 30 to 45 centimetres (12 to 18 inches) apart.

• Keep the plants weeded to eliminate competition.
• After they have bloomed, cut the plants back by half their height to neaten the clump. This stimulates a new flush of flowers.
• In the fall, mulch plants with a 2.5-centimetre-thick (inch-thick) layer of compost to protect them over winter.

• Divide plants every third year in spring as new growth begins or when clumps are crowded and flowering diminishes.
• To do this, lift a clump, cut away healthy young crowns and reset them in freshly dug soil. Space them one-and-a-half times their height to allow room for them to spread.
• Keep the soil moderately moist for several weeks after transplanting. This will help the young plants take hold.

Campanulas are perfect in many kinds of gardens and need relatively little encouragement. Just be sure to help them along once their established. That way, you'll have beautiful plants to look forward to every year.