30 September 2024

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.

32 comments:

  1. Awwwww, gee, that's so cute. My mother raised African Violets in North Dakota! I believe she always had good luck with them.

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    1. Why don't you try a couple of African violets in her memory?

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  2. That's a sweet story. I'll keep my eyes open for a busy lizzie. We have impatiens here, not sure about busy lizzie. I like starting houseplants from cuttings.

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    1. "Busy lizzie" is just an alternative name used widely in Britain but not I think in America.

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  3. I was very surprised to see impatiens growing in the ditch along a road in Mauii. They were about 3 ft high.

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    1. They would not have been native plants.

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  4. You've got a "greener" thumb that I; I am a notorious plant killer. Luckily Carlos tends to our plants!

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    1. But you are a notorious grass cutter! Sitting up there on your ride-on mower like Hopalong Cassidy as neighbours grumble, "That must be Bob again!"

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    2. Oh I am good, er, great at yardwork!

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  5. I like the original plant still being kept alive after all those years. Impatiens don't grow well for me so I gave up planting any long ago.

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    1. Regarding impatiens maybe you are too impatiens!

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  6. It is not crazy at all that you are keeping the line of that first little house plant alive. For their wedding in 1965, my parents recieved a small potted hibiscus. That plant is now a small tree with a proper wooden trunk and branches, still faithfully flowering every summer. My parents both saw it as their ‘marriage flower’, treasuring it greatly. Now that my Mum is on her own, she looks at the plant every day and it is one of the many good memories of my Dad.

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    1. Somehow a better way of connecting than a photograph. More soulful.

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  7. We were given a busy lizzie shortly after we moved into our first house and we nurtured it well, even encouraging it to grow up the wall in the hall! We gave lots of cuttings away and who knows, there may still be a descendent somewhere of the first one we had! Ours survived until our second house, when we moved on to more exotic indoor plants.

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    1. Should we judge social status by the plants we choose to nurture? Maybe so.

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  8. You're a sentimental soul.

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  9. Living together? Is that quite proper?
    I've heard of busy lizzie but I did not know it is Inpatients.
    What was it? Queen Bess' cake, where a bit of the old cake was put into the new. Maybe not, but your original plant lives on from its forty five year old offspring. Nice.

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    1. Living together is not quite proper but it is wise to have a practice run.

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  10. I have a rose my dad bought us before he died. Lots of us have sentiment for certain plants we own.

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    1. It's a nice way to link with history and with those who went before us Dave.

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  11. A wonderful link to your adult life. Pass cuttings onto the grand kids along with the history that the plant carries.

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  12. I think you should share cuttings with your children so your "busy lizzie" will live on and on...

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    1. That is a nice idea Ellen. Thank you.

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  13. It's almost like that plant was your first child.

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    1. You've got it. To me it feels that way for sure.

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  14. I have an impatien plant that just started growing in a potted plant of mine when I had an outside patio years ago. I saved the plant and now I still have it. You have encouraged me to take cuttings as it is looking rather leggy now.

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  15. It's been a long time since I had one of those. They have a name of the same meaning in Swedish but I don't think I ever knew they were among those easy to propagate by cuttings. I've done that with quite a few other houseplants over the years but none for as long as 45 years... Well done!

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  16. There is something very romantic in that story.

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