Impatiens capensis | nichepoetryandprose

poetry and prose about place

Posts Tagged ‘Impatiens capensis’

along the country road #5

Not far from where I live is a new road, built a few years ago along the edge of a field. When it was first built, it was a scar on the land, its ditches unlovely smears of muck.

This year, the weeds of the roadside have moved in to fill the empty spaces with green. At one place, where the new road joins the old, it is particularly wet and the ditches have been overwhelmed with a green and orange explosion of Jewel Weed.

Jewel Weed growing with cattails in a wet ditch

Jewel weed grows in wet springy places, in swampy woods, along brooks, and in ditches. Its masses of green foliage are hung with spurred, lobed flowers, orange, yellow or cream coloured with spots at the throat.

Jewel weed is also called spotted snapweed, spotted touch-me-not, lady’s earrings, Celandine, Solentine, impatiente (the French name for the genus), and chou sauvage. The names snapweed and touch-me-not, as well as the generic name, Latin for impatient, refer to the sudden bursting of the seed capsule when it is touched.

a profusion of Jewel Weed

The botanist, Nicolaas Meerburgh, who first named the plant, called it capensis, meaning “of the cape” since he wrongly thought it had been introduced from the Cape of Good Hope into European gardens.