Account
What the sources say about this taxon, as written.
discussion · 
Plazi
Remarks:—Older literature gives erroneous descriptions of flower color in I. glauca . For example, Chowdhery & Wadhwa (1984) describe flowers as “greenish”, and Vivekananthan et al. (1997) as “orange or pale red”. Greenish coloration could be an effect of observation of flower buds or freshly opened flowers. Observations of living material of I. glauca show that spur in fully open flowers is set at angle 10-30 degrees downward in comparison with lower sepal long axis, not parallel to it, as in drawing in Akiyama & Ohba (1993) . Vivekananthan et al. (1997) and Pusalkar & Srivastava (2018) give much shorter stature for the species: to 70 cm and 30-80 cm high, respectively; however, Chowdhery & Wadhwa (1984) wrote that it is “high herb”, without detailed data. Specimens from western Nepal (Polunin, Sykes and Williams 5052 and Polunin, Sykes and Williams 405) had annotations “to 5 feet high”. Our observations confirm that I. glauca could reach 1.8 m in late monsoon season. Majority of balsam species has spurred flowers, however there are numerous exceptions. Members of Madagascan section Trimorphopetalum (127 species; Fischer et al. 2017 ) have always spurless flowers. There are spurless species in North America ( I. ecornuta Gerry Moore, Zika & Rushworth (2012: 60)) , Himalaya ( I. gammiei Hook. f. (1905: 16), I. occultans Hook. f. (1905: 17), I. tuberculata Hook. f. & Thomson (1860: 155); Gogoi et al. 2018) and SE Asia ( I. casseabriae Y.H. Tan, S.S. Zhou & B. Yang (2017: 104) , I. decurva Ruchis & S.B. Janssens (2018: 64) . Several balsams have spurless varieties ( I. radiata var. mindatensis from Myanmar ; Akiyama et al. 2018 ), in some taxa spurred and spurless flowers could be found on the same plant ( I. racemosa DC. (1824: 688) ; Ruchisansakun et al. 2018). Sterile/abortive inflorescences were observed in Impatiens glauca ( Duthie 1886 ) , I. cymbifera Hook. (1875: 474) ( Grey-Wilson 1989 ) and recently in I. sterilis Y.Y. Cong & Y.X. Song ( Song et al. 2021: 48 ) . Akiyama & Ohba (2000) described inflorescence of I. glauca as type 9, including multi flowered inflorescences with bracts born in the middle of pedicel.