The giant balsam of
the Himalayas was described in 1839 in royle's Illustrations of
the Botany of theHimalayan Mountains with illustrations by an Indian artist. By 1840 it
had come over to England as a garden plant and was first recorded as establishing
itself outside gardens by 1855. When A.O. Hume saw it growing wild in Cornwall in
1900 he wrote a picture in the Journal of Botany:
"I notice that it has been called 'a cumbersome and weedy thing"; but growing
in the soft, warm
south-west, with the base of its stem in the clear running stream, it is a magnificent plant, 5-7
feet, or more, in height, stalwart, with a stem from one to one and a half inches in diameter just
above the surface of the water, erect, symmetrical in shape, with numerous aggregations of
blossom, the central mass as big as a man's head, and those terminating all the principal
lateral branches, though smaller, still most striking–masses
of bloom varying in difl'erent plants
through a dozen lovely shades of colour from the very palest pink imaginable to the deepest
claret colour, and with a profusion of large, elegant, dark green, lanceolate leaves, some of
them fully 15 inches in length."
From June to autumn,
its pink bank and billows of flower fill the West country valleys
valleys with a wide gentleness of colour ; and the plant has spreads far beyond
Cornwall the length and breadth of southern England and Wales.
