“An unpleasant rank smell from mucus glands,” says one website; “Jeyes Fluid,” says another; “ripe smell of peaches, like a girl’s breath through lipstick,” says Anne Stevenson in her 1982 love poem to a plant whose smell I would describe as “a wet morning at summer’s end – bees’ bums and weed juice”.
The plant is Himalayan or Indian balsam, policeman’s helmet, kiss-me-on-the-mountain, poor-man’s orchid, Impatiens glandulifera. Its “impatience” is demonstrated by an ability to pump itself up from a punctuation mark to head-height in a season, and its seedpods are grenades filled with 16 seeds that can go off at any second.
There is a legend that its seeds came to Britain in cotton bolls from India and were shaken out to accidentally colonise the canals and riversides of Lancashire mill towns. I don’t know if Himalayan balsam was around when Mahatma Gandhi visited Lancashire in September 1931 to see the plight of textile workers affected by the Indian swadeshi, or self-reliance, movement’s boycott of English-made cotton goods, or what he would have thought about the symbolic exchange of cotton wealth for the passive resistance and non-violent soul-force of weeds, but it is a fascinating irony.
Other sources say Himalayan balsam was introduced from the western Himalayas later, in 1895, as an ornamental plant for gardens, from which it is usually expelled, and colonised waterways, where it has been described as a disaster.
This morning, with raindrops poised to trigger the exploding seedpods, the long sawblade-edged leaves and the scarlet confectionery of its architecture does not look threateningly triffid-like, but something Gandhi might have seen as beautifully reliant on its own strength. The flowers, orchid-like flouncies in shades of pink and white, have been battered by the rain and by the take-off and landing of bees, which have ripped holes in petals like old underwear.
The sun comes out. A pale moth, maybe a wave, as trashed as a wedding dress in a swimming pool, hides under balsam leaves, tipsy red admirals roll up for windfalls and it doesn’t take long for carder bees to stick their bums out of Himalayan balsam flowers, making a wonderfully internationalist connection – that’s the smell.
