Evil creeping bellflower tops list of weed foes

Gardeners are asked about their favorite plant all the time, but it’s a question I never answer the same way twice. It depends on the day, the season or maybe even the year.

My list of most hated weeds, however, is well defined.

For years, garlic mustard weed (Alliaria petiolata) topped the list. The noxious weed was everywhere and, thanks to its prolific seeding habit, is easily shared among neighbors. However, years of diligently filling up dozens of contractor-size garbage bags is starting to pay off. Last year I only filled a little more than one bag.

That’s not to say the edible-gone-wrong (in England it’s a “lovely salad green”) has been eradicated from my yard. The small rosettes are among the only green in the garden right now.

Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) seems to have filled in where garlic mustard weed once ruled. The almost clear-stemmed, self-seeding annual grows in full-on thickets on the edges of our property, and although it is a nuisance in that it outcompetes almost everything else, it does have a few redeeming attributes. It’s attractive to hummingbirds and the sap in its succulent stems is said to relieve itching and have anti-fungal properties. For me, it’s best quality is that has a very small root system and is easy to pull by the handful.

Chickweed (Stellaria media) must be a magical weed because I swear it pops up in thick mats overnight. Its stems grow up to a foot long, but it’s the sheer number of them on each plant that is mind-boggling. I battle it with a dutch hoe, slicing off this annual just under the soil before it flowers. It will also crowd out anything else growing in the area, so it must get the heave-ho early.

My current weedy nemesis is wild raspberry (Rubus idaeus), which runs rampant in an area of the yard where I’m planning to create a new garden. If I were a better planner, I would have dealt with this prickly patch last year or the year before. But since planning has never been my strong suit, I spent several hours over the weekend pulling it out by hand. The job wasn’t too difficult thanks to sandy soil and a heavy rain the night before, but I know this is a fight I’ll have for years to come, thanks to its aggressive spread via rhizomes. Any that are left in the soil will continue to grow.

But all of these weedy foes pale in comparison to the true evil of creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides). It sucked me in with its long stem of pretty bell-shaped purple flowers when I was a new gardener and, despite a strong warning from an experienced gardener, I decided to enjoy the flowers. Little did I know that I was allowing it to spew up to 15,000 seeds per plant around my garden. And each of those plants creates new plants through roots that, true to its name, creep underground.

I have paid the price for that poor garden decision for well more than a decade now, and routinely go to battle with this insidious thug.

Someone once asked me what they should do about “that weed with the pretty purple flower spike.”

My advice — move.