This beautiful plant is more sinister than you may expect

Who doesn't love beautiful flowers? Whether you're a passionate gardener or just a passerby, flowers can liven up a community and brighten anyone's day. However, there's one deceptive plant that may trick you with its looks.

The creeping bellflower looks like a regular nice-looking flower, but Membership Coordinator with the Strathmore Country Gardens Club Trish Woods warns that it's actually an invasive weed.

"A lot of them look and act just like a normal plant that you would plant in your flower garden or your planter even. But then it's the way that they spread, it spreads with roots that are way down deep in the soil, and once it gets hold of an area, in order to eradicate it... one person says you need dynamite," she said.

The creeping bellflower can spread incredibly quickly, as one plant can produce up to 15 000 seeds. On top of this, Woods explains that the roots grow quickly and are tuberous, so it can cover a huge range of land and be difficult to pull out. While you may think it looks nice initially, you may be having second thoughts when it's all you see in your yard.

"People, have a hard time believing that it's invasive because it's so pretty right? And it's also very resistant to herbicides, it is able to displace and take over lawns, gardens, flower beds, it'll just go everywhere."

Once the bellflower spreads, good luck planting anything else. Besides the fact that you may not have space to plant things, the roots control most of the area so other plants can't get the nutrition they need.

"It just chokes out everything else, and nothing else can grow except the creeping bellflower. They take control of the area that they're in. The roots are just everywhere they just dominate wherever they are so that basically nothing else can grow there."

If you want to avoid the creeping bellflower, several gardening websites and municipalities like the City of Calgary recommend digging the plant out and getting all the roots out. Since they are resistant to a lot of herbicides, you may find that spraying them will not work. If you do dig them out, send them to a landfill instead of composting them.

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