Impatiens

There are around a thousand different species of impatiens. Most are outdoor plants but a few are better suited for indoors. They include impatiens walleriana, once native to East Africa and named after a British missionary called Horace Waller. In Great Britain this familiar flowering plant is commonly known as busy lizzie.

Forty five years ago someone kindly gave me a little busy lizzie plant. When I come to think of it, it was my first ever house plant. It arrived shortly before Shirley and I met up and began living together. We took it to our first proper home - a rented one bedroom flat on Wiseton Road at Hunter's Bar

The plant received much attention. We watered it, fed it with "Baby Bio" and carefully nipped off unwanted shoots to encourage bushiness. It stood on a dressing table in our bedroom and through our stewardship it became a marvellous example of an indoor busy lizzie - green and vigorous with plenty of little pink flowers. Somewhere in this house I have a print of that  much loved plant.

There is a sense in which busy lizzies do not last forever. They become leggy and tired like residents of a care home. They have to go. Unfortunately, they do not produce seeds so if you want their lineage to endure you have to take cuttings. 

The cuttings are placed in water with leaves above the surface and after a week or two, little white roots begin to appear. You then place the cuttings in little plant pots in a medium of  nutritious compost. Usually these cuttings will grow  without much trouble and after three or four months they will have grown so much that you will need to repot them in larger vessels.

This is a process I know very well because every year for the past forty five years I have taken new cuttings that all link back to the the little flat on Wiseton Road and the ancestor plant that stood upon our dressing table.

A while ago, I took three of the tiniest cuttings I have ever sought to propagate but they all came through and now the developing plants are three weeks old. Crazily, I tend to think that I am duty-bound to continue the family tree and if it should end then a part of me will be lost too. The busy lizzies have come to represent a special link back to the past - to simpler times and youth and the birth of love.