A small plant with attractive milky-white flowers with red stripes discovered in the Western Ghats has now been identified as a rare, wild cousin of the popular garden balsam.
Researchers stumbled upon the herb during a floristic survey in the Agasthyamala biosphere reserve in Thiruvananthapuram district. They initially took it for Impatiens uncinata, a familiar species of the genus Impatiens, to which the garden balsams also belong.
But a closer look had prompted a detailed scientific study, which eventually resulted in the plant being labelled a new species of Impatiens (family Balsaminaceae).
