How Does Your Garden Grow - Part Deaux

The dark rectangles of earth yawped at her. Each moment on the balcony was just another painful reminder that her fingers were deadly, not green.

After the gladiola massacre of last year, she was quite certain of her fatal impact on green things, but then, as if from a hallelujah singing cloud, along came Campanula - a coy little plant who was flirty and purple and prolific! This two feet swathe of happy green and sprays of colour brought solace to the bleak potted landscape of her three by one concrete garden. It also brought bumblebees!
So smitten was she that she declared to all four corners of the block that she would renounce all ties to the dark side and dedicate water and time to keeping this beauty alive!

But first, she must know it's name!

She didn't know that at first...or rather mother-in-law, source of the gift, had mentioned it, but it had gone straight through her brain and out the other end in text-book sieve-like fashion. Obviously, she was not going to admit that she'd forgotten it, so she did what any self-respecting scatterbrain would do. She took a picture of the flower on her phone and posted it to her email where she could open it on screen next to a Google search of every five-petaled purple flower in the world. In no time at all (four hours) she found it. A little further research (one blog post) taught her that one could take cuttings from a Campanula by pulling gently on the base of the stem near the roots. Detaching a stem with some roots at the end was preferable but not mandatory, according to her anonymous green guru.

After some light tugging, and ignoring the handful of accidental decapitations, she ended up with eight stems with roots attached. Holes were poked in hungry earth. The stems were duly planted, and two months later she looked down with pride and joy to see her eight thriving Campanula children blooming beside their mother.