The Nature of Himalayan Balsam: reviled by many and embraced by the few.
Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) was introduced to Kew Gardens from Kashmir in 1839, brought as an ornamental plant and dispersed by gardeners and beekeepers who celebrated its nectar rich flowers.
It is indisputably a handsome plant with sweet, scented purple to pink flowers growing to at least two metres in height with hollow red stems. It is an annual plant, withering in the autumn, but its highly efficient seed dispersal means that it can colonise the damp places it favours, riverbanks, ditches and wet meadows, swiftly. Its seeds are spread by the extraordinary spring mechanism of its pods, scattering them up to seven metres from the parent plant.
Many groups of conservationists see it as a thug and a threat: choking waterways, eroding riverbanks and smothering native species.
"Himalayan balsam" by Ashley Basil is licensed under CC BY 2.0.The Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Organisation have adopted a best practice guide, RAPID, that stands for Reducing and Preventing Invasive Alien Species and Dispersal. They organised a Big Balsam Bash in 2021 where volunteers tore up Himalayan Balsam from riverbanks. It is in fact easy to pull up because it has very shallow roots and grows in soft ground.
As far as I could see on my internet search a lone voice speaks up for Himalayan Balsam – Chris Thomas, Professor of Conservation Biology at York University. He believes such species can add to biodiversity. He says that plants and animals are altering where they live because of climate change and because we human beings are steadily and relentlessly changing the world’s habitats. Professor Thomas’s message is that we should ‘attempt to embrace the new invaders’ and that there are more useful ways of helping wildlife and native plants than by bashing balsam.
Helen Baczkowska of NWT tells us that the Trust hand pulls Himalayan Balsam where it becomes dominant, especially on nature reserves where it is crowding out other plants. However she says that we live in such changing times that it is not easy to know what the best strategy is and “overall I suspect that trying to eradicate it is unlikely to succeed and so we need to live with it a lot of the time, but in certain cases we might need to monitor or control it, especially where it chokes water courses or crowds out orchids.”
Sources:
Guardian newspaper 7.6.21
You can read more about monitoring the spread of Himalayan Balsam here
Written October 2022
Published January 2025
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