Which flower most clearly says cottage garden to you: delphiniums? Pinks? Lupins? Roses? Bellflowers maybe, or campanulas, as gardeners call them? They’re all in with a chance, although most of them are one-season wonders, whereas campanulas as a group cover a long season, from herbaceous border to rockery, indoors and out. You might say they are the cottage garden plant par excellence.
The real star of the family, the one that makes the biggest splash now in high summer, ideal companion to roses and visually a brother to delphiniums, is Campanula lactiflora, the milky bellflower. Chest-high, in clumps as wide as you, you’ll find it more often than not in the form ‘Prichard’s Variety’, which is a rather steely violet blue, and excellent with deep pink roses. It makes a fine plant to grow at the back of a rose border, where it will gain a little protection from the roses. ‘Loddon Anna’ is a lovely icy-pink variety and ‘Pouffe’ is a knee-high blue.
Campanulas aren’t weak — the fat stems support themselves well enough, but in a windy position and under the weight of rain the clumps can be inclined to splay, so a little neighbourly presence from shrubs is no bad thing. Overfeeding is the fast route to it not standing well. Once it has flowered — and maybe now, after those hammering rains, is a good time to cut back — you can chop off the upper, flowered portion of the stem and it will produce a little more flower for later in the year. It’s tough, and happy in most soils so long as they’re not wet.
While the steely ‘Prichard’s Variety’ blue is vibrant, come high summer I prefer the more natural, nearer-to-wild forms of it, which vary from pale blue to lilac to white. And if you grow it from seed and then plant out a few clumps, it should turn out to be deliciously different (but still similar enough) and it looks great.
Stephen’s favourite campanulas
Campanula glomerata ‘Superba’
One of the first campanulas I grew in our wet and windy Dales garden was the clustered bellflower Campanula glomerata ‘Superba’, a totally unkillable little thing, knee-high, fast-spreading, with purple domes of flower and producing further domelets in the lower leaf axils. A great starter plant for kids.
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C. persicifolia
The other campanula that you see in so many gardens is the peach-leaved bellflower C. persicifolia, as often as not in its white variety, as well as the typical blue. This too spreads, although more gently at the base, making a mat of bright green foliage from which arises a forest of slender 70cm spires, never more at cottagey home than with clove pinks or astrantias. These will flower again if shortened back after flowering, and gently self-seed too, if you let them.
C. latifolia, C. latiloba and C. trachelium
You could fill a garden with campanulas if you had a mind to. There are the tall spires of C. latifolia and C. latiloba, and the nettle-leaved C. trachelium, which flowers in late summer and has a lovely double white form ‘Alba Plena’. Don’t worry, it doesn’t sting (it only looks like nettles).
C. poscharskyana
These are substantial border plants that colonise front garden walls, running through the mortar and popping out to make trails of luminous lavender. Like aubrieta, it is one of the joys of vertical gardening and once established will keep going. All you need to do is rip off the stems after flowering and a new sweet covering emerges.
C. ‘Burghaltii’
‘Burghaltii’ produces long dangling bells — almost test tubes — of a strange grey lilac on floppy 60cm stems; C. takesimana is similar but lilac with maroon spots inside. They’re compelling all right, if not the easiest garden plants.
C. rotundifolia
So much variety. Yet sometimes I think my favourite campanula is the simple harebell C. rotundifolia — the bluebell of Scotland. When it first appears in thin patches of fields and dry banks, dangling its few modest bells on cotton-thin stems, you know the second half of the year has begun.
Indoor varieties to plant
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There are houseplant campanulas too. You may have been given a Star of Bethlehem (C. isophylla), a delicate, blue, trailing plant with pale green heart-shaped leaves, but you’ve probably never grown the (tall as a) chimney C. pyramidalis, which at nearly 3m used to be grown in a pot as a showpiece biennial. That’s a far cry from the little outdoor alpine campanulas, such as C. cochlearifolia, which even after a few years only produce a pancake of stems and foliage the size of a dinner plate, if the slugs don’t polish them off first.
Question time
Q. My Clematis montana is 20 years old and very woody. There are a lot of new shoots growing at ground level from the old wood. Will these come true to the original plant and how much old wood can I cut back?
D Hickson
A. Varieties of Clematis montana are not grafted, so you can assume those low shoots are all true ‘Mayleen’. Cut off most of that old upper growth this winter and retain only those stems coming from low down. It’ll be hard to disentangle them, so start by persuading the low stems’ summer growth out of the muddle.
Q. We bought a Magnolia grandiflora in 1999 and put it behind our summer house until we found the right spot for it in 2019. At 2.5m, it is spindly and flowers little. Should we cut it back to a few branches?
T Jonczyk
A. Ten years is a long time for a plant to kick about in a pot. I hope you opened up the rootball a little when you planted it. Magnolia grandiflora can be pruned hard, but in this case just be patient and really cosset its roots.
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Shorten back the tallest shoots by a couple of feet — to green shoots, not bare stumps. Then remove the turf around its roots to a radius of 1m and mulch that heavily with garden compost twice a year. Water it whenever it’s dry.
● Send your questions to stephen.anderton@thetimes.co.uk
Weeder’s digest
Keep dead-heading. The sooner seedheads are removed, the sooner the plant can produce more flowers. Look to perennials such as salvias, osteospermums, heleniums, phlox, Anemone ‘Wild Swan’; and of bedding plants, geraniums, diascias, argyranthemums, pot marigolds etc. Many petunias are sterile and make no seedpods, but if you spot any forming, nip them off straight away.
Sweet peas especially should be kept picked as, once seeds start to form, the plant thinks its job is done and flowering falls off. So if there are flowers not fit for a vase, still pick them but compost them, to keep more coming.
To freshen the plant and induce a lot more flowers, by way of removing a mass of seedheads, shear back by half clumps of bloody cranesbill Geranium sanguineum, including the pale pink lancastrense and white ‘Album’. The little Mexican daisy Erigeron karvinskianus, so good in walls and paving cracks, can also be reduced.
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Hydrangeas make brilliant plants for tubs and big containers, but they are thirsty; for the longest attractive life of the flowers (and it’s long!) don’t let them wilt in hot windy weather. Putting a shallow saucer underneath for the hottest couple of months, to create a small, brief reservoir, makes your life easier.
Now’s the time to make hydrangea cuttings and they could not be easier — they will even root in a jar of water in a shady window, using a firm but still-green shoot. If you can scrounge a piece of a variety you fancy, have a go. Otherwise, set 7cm tip cuttings of “just-firm” growth around the edge of a small pot under polythene, ventilated to reduce condensation. They root quickly.
