Evening Walk : Harebell - 15 August 2024

Every summer I try to take photos of this beautiful and delicate flower which grows really close to the ground in the middle of a lane.

I see this flower during my evening walk and it’s really hard to take photos firstly because the flowers are very low so I have to bend down a lot to take the photos, and secondly because they grow in a shady spot. The combination of these two factors mean that I take many photos that are normally either a bit blurry or not good enough to share.

Yesterday it was very sunny during the day so in the evening I managed to get slightly better photos :

These flowers are called Common Harebell or Campanula rotundifolia. The flowers are very delicate and small and the stems are very thin indeed. I found very interesting information on this website which also sells the small plants for £2.45 each or about 18 Steem. I’m seriously thinking of buying some of these delicate flowers to put them in a plant pot and see how they fare.

Apparently the plant is both hardy and perennial so if I manage to buy a couple of plants they should live on and hopefully come back every year. It would be really nice to own this. The website above gave a lot of information on how to plant it too recommending waiting for two years before planting out.

I also found here that the plant is considered native :

Harebells are native to dry, nutrient-poor grassland and heaths in Britain. The flowers usually have five (occasionally 4, 6 or 7) pale to mid violet-blue petals fused together into a bell-shaped flower.

I was a bit intrigued by the Latin name 'campanula' and found here that it means 'little bell'.

I wondered what I'd get if I searched under the Latin name, Campanula rotundifolia, on You Tube. I found a fairly recent video with more scientific information about this plant and the family it belongs to. Sadly the channel seems to have stopped uploading videos. I reckon many people started channels during the pandemic and then had to stop :

I enjoyed learning about the campanulaceae family of flowers the harebell belongs to. This is only a 4 minute video that presents the information quite briefly but clearly.

Thank you for reading !

(All the photos are mine).