The time of year is upon us again, the time to go out and pull up some Himalayan Balsam before it spreads it seeds for next year! Most of you will probably be aware of this troublesome invasive but for those of you who are not here’s a quick bit of background.
Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) is a non-native invasive species introduced to the uk in 1839. it is a tall growing (2-3 m) annual plant with a fleshy green stem (similar in texture to celery) and between June and octobers it produces clusters of purplish pink helmet shaped flowers. The problem with Himalayan Balsam is that it spreads it’s seeds, sometimes as many as 800 per plant, explosively over a 4m radius meaning that it can quickly proliferate itself over entire areas. Once a population has developed it shades out native species to the extent that many die off, it also acts as a competitor in terms of attracting pollinating insects so it can also be detrimental to further nearby species.
Davidson mains park in the west of Edinburgh has had a large population of Himalayan for a number of years but thanks to the tireless work of the friends of davidson mains park, notably it’s chairperson Mrs Eunice Smith and her husband, the problem is steadily being tackled. TCV Edinburgh’s Mid-week volunteering team has also lent a hand on numerous days of Balsam pulling over the last three years with the most recent being on thursday the 28th of last month.
This time our volunteer team was working to clear any Balsam that had snuck it’s way back into the woodland that had been cleared in the previous year and in doing so hopefully stopping the spread of the species into new area’s of the park. The volunteers all came well prepared with waterproofs and even gators worn over the arms and this wasn’t to keep the rain off (although that is not to say that the day was wholly dry) but rather to help minimize the amount of nettle stings as balsam likes nothing better than to grow right amongst big patches of them. As you can see in the pictures below we encountered some monstrously large specimens but by the end of the day everyone left feeling that not only had we made a difference but that also there were area’s that showed an improvement from the previous year.
one of our volunteers next to the biggest Balsam ever seen by human eyes!
Another giant one!
However despite the hard work of our volunteers and the friends of davidsons mains group their is still a lot of balsam around that is why we’d like to urge anyone who is a regular user of the park to try and pull a few out everytime you take a walk through. The plants come up easily by the roots, It only takes a few seconds to do, and all you need to do is hang them over a tree branch to ensure they don’t re-root themselves. Together we can beat the Balsam!