The giant balsam of the Himalayas was described in 1839 in Royle's Illustrations of the
Botany of the
Himalayan 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 with a wide
gentleness of colour ; and the plant has spreads far beyond Cornwall the length and breadth of southern England and
Wales.
