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Balsaminaceae family

Oliver's Touch-me-not Impatiens sodenii

Oliver's Touch-me-not is an introduced perennial shrub, found in Hawaii. It grows to 4 ft.

More about this plant

Impatiens sodenii is a species of flowering plant in the family Balsaminaceae known by the common names poor man's rhododendron, Oliver's touch-me-not, and shrub balsam. It is native to Kenya and Tanzania, and widely cultivated as an ornamental plant. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) — Height
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
McKenzie et al. 2025 — community-science image analysis (MIT) — Flower colour
Height
4 ft
Lifespan
Perennial
Flower colour
Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
In the garden
Shrub layer — Sits in the shrub of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
AI = read by an AI vision model · DERIVED = a computed estimate, not a direct measurement. The “How we know this” section below details each.
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
❧ Caterpillar hosts ~12 caterpillar species

Impatiens supports ~12 caterpillar species.

Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a moderate genus.

Recorded feeding on Impatiens in North America, including:

Argyrotaenia velutinana · Red-Banded Leafroller Caripeta divisata · Gray Spruce Looper Choristoneura fumiferana · Spruce Budworm Ecliptopera silaceata · Small Phoenix Ecliptoptera silaceata · geometer (inchworm) moth Euchlaena obtusaria · Obtuse Euchlaena
+ 8 more species →
Euphyia unangulata · Sharp-Angled Carpet Olethreutes agilana · leafroller moth Olethreutes albiciliana · leafroller moth Orthodes crenulata · owlet moth Pseudorthodes vecors · Small Brown Quaker Spilosoma latipennis · Pink-Legged Tiger Moth Spoladea recurvalis · Banded Sable Trichodezia albovittata · White-Striped Black
Keystone count (genus-level) from Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use records. Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0).
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor

1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Oliver's Touch-me-not :

Apis mellifera · Honey Bee
Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI →
Wildlife & visitors 5 birds · 2 nectaring

Open records of who else uses Oliver's Touch-me-not — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.

2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:

Danaus plexippus · Monarch Pieris brassicae · Large White
Interaction records (observations, not exhaustive) from GloBI → (CC0). Counts are distinct species; names are the most-recorded. Common names from Wikidata (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
How we know this (1) Methods & honest limits
Flower colour Derived

McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.

Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.

McKenzie, P., Berardi, A.E., Hopkins, R. (2025). flower_color_phenology (MIT).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (18) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[05] Invasive / introduced status — US-RIIS v2.0 (USGS)
[06] Wetland indicator — USACE National Wetland Plant List (2022)
[08] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[09] Ecological value — Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[11] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
[15] Flower-visitor value (derived) — Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI
[16] Caterpillar host count — Warren II 2026 (Dryad, CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[17] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[18] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
Cite this page Open data, please attribute

PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).

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