Garden Plants - Impatiens

The common name for the impatiens is, of course, Busy Lizzie. The botanical name comes from the Latin impatiens, or impatient, and was chosen for the way the plant shoots its seeds out of their pods. This system of propagation serves the plant extremely well, and in regions not as frosty as the UK, it's considered a pest almost on the scale of dandelions, because the seeds travel so far that one plant can take over an acre in three years!

The plant has other bad habits too - it's got a family tree like the worst kind of incestuous web-footed inbred population. In fact, Joseph Hooker, a famous botanist and one time director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was trying to unravel the impatiens from its dubious cousins when he died - he called it 'deceitful above all plants, worse even than orchids' which is pretty harsh coming from a plant-lover!

The impatiens we know best from garden centres, tubs and hanging baskets is the impatiens sultanii which was sent to England from Zanzibar in 1865 by John Kirk. He named it for the Sultan of Zanzibar, where Kirk served as British Consul.

He was another person who found botany rather trying. He'd first travelled to Africa with the famous Dr Livingstone, about whom he was later to say 'he's out of his mind!' Not only did Kirk lose all his drawings and notes when their canoe was overturned in rapids, but they also had to climb over rocks so hot that their feet were burned through their boots and they were attacked by clouds of midges so dense that the local inhabitants would press them into flat cakes, like biscuits, and eat them!

Garden Impatiens photograph by bc anna, used under a creative commons attribution licence