oh you English .. and your use of the english language.. is beyond me at times.. lol ...

is Busy Lizzies a cultivar ... or just what you call these things..

if so.. why are they busy ... riotous color?? .. or do they do things in your garden at night.. that i dont know about... i am not sure i want to link you to the urbandictionary.com .. for what that all means ... [search GET BUSY]

and why lizzie ... obscure derogatory reference to a prior queen????

i just dont get it .. lol ...

BUT I DIGRESS [apparently???] ... wait.. one more stupid question.. they are a 4 month annual for me.. are they near perennial for your zone???? they barely live long enough to attract and encourage mildews ...

never saw mildew on mine when i grew them.. but we actually get sunshine here in the states on a quite high number of days ....

so many questions.. so little time .. and not much answer to your mystery .. lol ..

ken

ps: one of the easiest things to grow from a pack of seeds indoors in late winter.. that i ever tried .... started too early.. and had to constantly cut and stick them in vermiculite.. and ended up with a couple billion by spring ... if you need them .. start some indoors under lights from seed ...

ken, you've GOT to be kidding...I know that you know of this very common (though old fashioned in this country)nick-name for Impatiens! lol Look it up. ;-)

flora, to my knowledge, this very common disease of annuals and veggies has not swept over the Impatiens crop in this country. At least, not on a large scale. We see downy mildew on a host of herbaceous plants, typically brought about by conditions that are simply too moist. Cool, cloudy, and wet are optimum conditions for these fungi. Does that sound familiar?

Our garden club has built a large display for our county fair for over forty years. We have always used at least three hundred Impatiens as part of our display. This display is in a building with less than ideal light but Impatiens have always held up well enough. Last August we had to replace every Impatiens at least once and many twice. Our fair planning session was held yesterday and we were unanimous in not using Impatiens this year due to the mold problem. We also agreed to look into a way to provide better air circulation. All our plants are in one gallon pots and must be packed close together as the edge of pots can not show. Al

ken, you've GOT to be kidding...

===>>> of course i was ... i was in a good mood.. and it was an attempt at humor... i hope ...

regardless.. i never had heard the term before..

lizzy ??? why lizzie??? some obscure reference to thin lizzy???

ken

Here is a link that might be useful: link

ken - I have no idea where the name comes from - but that's what we call them. They are not perennial here although the article is not very clear. It's the mildew which has survived the winter, not the BLs.

Flora, there are annual AND perennial BLs. The ones pictured in your article are annuals.

I hate to hear of this problem. It wouldn't take much for this plant disease to run amok over here, either. Impatiens are so popular, so commonly used, and so often planted in large numbers. That, along with our penchant for using chemicals at the first hint (or even rumor) of a problem, and we've set ourselves up for the widespread outbreak of a chemical resistance problem.

We speak often about insect pests becoming resistant to the chemical-du-jour, but rarely does the subject of resistant plant diseases....at least among private homeowners who are a huge part of the market (and the problem). Growers and professionals are well aware of it.

We may just be hearing a LOT about Impatiens this year! Anybody have some good suggestions for alternatives? That gorgeous, glowing color for the shady locations around our yard will be hard to replace.

I've attached a little fact sheet that provides some useful information.

Here is a link that might be useful: Impatiens Downy Mildew

rhizo - if you kept the common bedding forms of Impatiens walleriana indoors would they prove to be perennial? They are grown as annuals here but are they actually tender perennials like the old-fashioned leggy fluorescent pink version which is a common pass along house plant? Could there be botanically annual and perennial versions of I walleriana? I don't actually grow them myself apart from half a dozen or so in a pot some years so I have never tried the experiment of keeping them over winter.

If you read the article well, it implies that the suspected infections started from infected cuttings. zounds. They are seldom grown from cutting propagated stock in this country. I'd say 99% or greater are seed grown each spring and grown on by plug. This has obviously been in introduced disease, much as the horrible plague of powedery mildrew on poinsettias sometime back in the early 90s. I had purchased top of the line cuttings from one of the best breeders, and the apparently healthy stock had already been innoculated.

If you must have them, start from seed grown stock. It may mean finding a local smaller grower, but don't start out with any cutting grown stock. No, people like us cannot always control downy mildew regardless of the chemicals we have access to. And many growers do not prophylactically treat plants for this disease and once it settles into your crops, you really can't eradicate it well. Keep it under control yes, but eradicate it .........no. Not a big problem for container crops lie a poinsettia which will not be set outside, and the customer doesn't expect to plant in the gardens. But a really bad headache for someonew who would intend to grow it on at home.

You can do some things culturally to help your plants from being succesceptible to it, and you can treat them before the fact to prevent it from moving into your culture, if you are into chemical use. But, it will be well established by the time you see the powdery colonies under the leaves. If you plant them you are also setting up a potential vector pool to pass the disease along if they become infected. It might be wise if the governement says to take a break from growing them to do just that. It stops an epidemic in its tracks.

They're called buzy lizzies because of the constant profuse blooming. btw Most of the disease problems with impatiens in this country in humid or wet weather is caused by botrytis. We've also had some problems with impatien necrotic spot syndrome.

calliope - there has not been any government pronouncement on growing BLs as far as I know. It's just that some of the big distributors are not going to be raising or selling any this year. Most BLs here are seed raised too, as you say. The linked article says it's 95%. Being seed raised has no effect on their susceptibility to acquiring DM and the current chemical controls are proving ineffective. The idea of control by keeping foliage dry in a British garden is a joke.

As I said - I rarely grow them except for the occasional half dozen in a container planting.

Here is a link that might be useful: More on mildew

"Being seed raised has no effect on their susceptibility to acquiring DM"

Yes, I'm aware of that. I was referring to the article you linked. It said "Impatiens downy mildew is thought to have been brought to the UK with imported cuttings and was first identified in 2003." It's host specific, so somebody imported infected impatien vegetative material to the U.K. I did't mean to imply they wouldn't be susceptible after planting in your garden. I just meant, if you found a grower who wasn't using vegetative cuttings for them at all (many double varieties are grown almost exclusively by cutting) you could at least have a chance of starting out with clean stock.

I notice it has been reported last year in one state in the U.S. and growers here have been forewarned to watch for it. Yes, I know the English climate well. Sometimes when laundry is hung to line to dry, it comes in damper than when it went out. LOL.