PlantKey Open ecological atlas
Planner
Home / Browse / Campanula / Tussock Bellflower
iNaturalist — CC, credited & licensed per image
Campanulaceae family

Tussock Bellflower Campanula carpatica

Tussock Bellflower is an introduced perennial herb, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 0.7 ft.

More about this plant

Campanula carpatica, the tussock bellflower or Carpathian harebell, is a species of flowering plant in the family Campanulaceae. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
Cold hardiness (derived) — Hardiness
Hardiness
≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) — Height · Foliage
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
McKenzie et al. 2025 — community-science image analysis (MIT) — Flower colour
Height
0.7 ft
Lifespan
Perennial
Foliage
Broadleaf
Flower colour
Purple AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
In the garden
Ground-cover layer — Sits in the ground-cover of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
Living mulch / groundcover — Low, ground-hugging grower — can carpet bare soil as a living mulch, shading out weeds and holding moisture.Open guide →
derived roles
AI = read by an AI vision model · DERIVED = a computed estimate, not a direct measurement. The “How we know this” section below details each.
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 13 bee visitors

Specialist native bees depend on it.

Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Campanula is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.

Xerces pollinator conservation →

13 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Tussock Bellflower — the 12 most-recorded:

Bombus terrestris · Buff-Tailed Bumblebee Chelostoma campanularum Melitta haemorrhoidalis · melittid bee Biastes truncatus Bombus lapidarius · bumble bee Chelostoma distinctum
+ 6 more bees →
Chelostoma foveolatum Chelostoma rapunculi Dufourea alpina · sweat bee Dufourea dentiventris · sweat bee Lasioglossum bavaricum · sweat bee Nomada emarginata · cuckoo bee
Specialist hosts from Smith et al. 2024. Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI →
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
Photosynthesis Direct fact

A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.

Kattge, J. et al. TRY plant trait database — Categorical Traits Dataset (2012).
Flower colour Derived

McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.

Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.

McKenzie, P., Berardi, A.E., Hopkins, R. (2025). flower_color_phenology (MIT).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (17) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[05] Invasive / introduced status — US-RIIS v2.0 (USGS)
[07] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[08] Ecological value — GloBI · Smith et al. 2024 (CC BY)
[11] Functional traits — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[12] Photosynthetic pathway — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[13] Cold hardiness (derived) — Derived from U.S. range × USDA PHZM zones
[16] Flower-visitor value (derived) — Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI
[17] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
Cite this page Open data, please attribute

PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).

Citation

Loading…

BibTeX 
Loading…