Impatiens balfouriiHook.f.

Balfour's touch-me-not

WFO wfo-0000730259 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Impatiens balfourii, photographed by Josep Gesti
fig. a Josep Gesti, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2021-10-17 / obs. 164032384

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Regions where Impatiens balfourii is native: Pakistan, West Himalaya PakistanWest Himalaya
Native distribution of Impatiens balfourii, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Pakistan PAK ASIA-TROPICAL
West Himalaya WHM

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 278 in flower of 281 examined

Proportion of examined Impatiens balfourii in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 2 2 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 2 2 too few examined
Apr 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
May 3 3 too few examined
Jun 20 22 91% 72% to 97%
Jul 44 44 100% 92% to 100%
Aug 90 90 100% 96% to 100%
Sep 55 56 98% 91% to 100%
Oct 42 42 100% 92% to 100%
Nov 13 13 100% 77% to 100%
Dec 2 2 too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Impatiens balfourii observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 278 of 281 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,992 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -13.0 °C -0.1 °C 5.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.0 °C 25.3 °C 28.5 °C
Annual rainfall 657 mm 1,025 mm 1,749 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 28 mm 162 mm 266 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,992 research-grade observations of Impatiens balfourii that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 1 synonym

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Impatiens mathildae Chiov.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.