Whence
Busy Lizzie (impatiens)
Plant

Where does Busy Lizzie (impatiens) come from?

The busy Lizzie comes from eastern Africa, where it grows wild from Kenya to Mozambique. Sent to Britain as a stowaway in a box of plants around 1880, it became one of the world's most popular bedding plants, filling window boxes and shady park beds.

A soft plant of the tropics

Impatiens walleriana is a herbaceous perennial, 15 to 60 cm tall, with semi-succulent stems; every part of the plant is soft and easily damaged. Its flowers, 2 to 5 cm across, have five petals and a slender spur. In the wild it grows in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, mostly in wet tropical places. Where there is no frost it lives for years, but it cannot survive cold, so in cooler countries it is sown indoors in winter and planted out as an annual.

Seedlings under a bench at Kew

Around 1880 the Scottish explorer John Kirk sent a glass-sided Wardian case of plants from Zanzibar to Kew Gardens in London. Seedlings with scarlet flowers sprang up from the Zanzibar soil that had been tipped under a greenhouse bench. In 1882 Kew's director, Joseph Hooker, named them Impatiens sultani after Barghash bin Said, the Sultan of Zanzibar. Today's name, walleriana, honours the British missionary Horace Waller, a companion of David Livingstone.

Why people think of Europe

The plant spread fast through Europe's nurseries: by 1884 a grower in Alkmaar, in the Netherlands, was praising its bright carmine-red flowers. It earned homely nicknames too. Near Berlin it was called fleißiges Lieschen, 'busy little Liese', by 1903, because it flowered tirelessly, and Dutch took it over as vlijtig liesje, just as English says busy Lizzie. Such familiar names, and its place in so many window boxes, make it look like an old European flower.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Impatiens walleriana ↗ · plants.ces.ncsu.edu ↗ · neerlandistiek.nl ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Horace Waller (activist) ↗

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