A Lawyer's Photo Led Botanists to Sri Lanka's New Balsam

Some species new to science are found on expensive expeditions. This one showed up in a lawyer's vacation photos. On a walk near Manna Kathi Ella, a waterfall site in the Kithulgala rainforest, attorney Salani Gunaratne photographed the wildflowers around her the way any traveler would. When she shared the pictures on social media, they set off a chain of events that ended with the formal description of a new balsam found nowhere else on Earth.

The plant is now named Impatiens yakandawalarum, a spurless balsam from Sri Lanka's lowland wet zone. According to the peer-reviewed paper published in the Ceylon Journal of Science, it is the first Sri Lankan member of its genus documented with a consistently spurless lower sepal — the petal structure that usually extends into a thin tube in balsams. That missing spur, paired with a fleshy underground storage organ, separates this new balsam from every relative on the island.

A vacation snapshot, peer-reviewed

The route from photo to publication reads like a modern natural-history timeline. Gunaratne, an attorney and environmental-law postgraduate at the University of Colombo, posted her Mannakethi Ella photographs online. Environmental explorer Peshala Pasan Karunaratna noticed that one plant looked close to the known Impatiens janthina yet carried clearly different flowers. He shared the images with Bhatia Gopallawa, a University of Peradeniya doctoral researcher who studies the country's balsams, and Gopallawa traveled to the site to examine the plant in its habitat.

Herbarium work and field observations confirmed what the photographs suggested: no one had described this plant before. The team then named the new balsam Impatiens yakandawalarum, honoring leading Sri Lankan botanists Kapila Yakandawala and Deepthi Yakandawala, as documented in the Natureframe account of the discovery. Researchers also proposed "Kithulgala Balsam" as the English common name. The formal paper, which appeared in the Ceylon Journal of Science at the end of September, includes the full description and illustrations.

What makes this new balsam different

If you know balsams at all, you probably know them as garden bedding plants — the busy Lizzies and touch-me-nots whose ripe seed pods pop open at a touch. This new balsam's wild cousins are pickier. The species grows roughly 20 to 35 centimeters tall on thin soil covering steep, mossy rock faces and moss-covered tree roots, usually in clusters. Its flowers measure about two centimeters across: deep pink, with a line of dark purple spots inside the sepals. Below ground sits a modified, tuber-like stem, and the leaves are completely smooth.

Side by side with its relatives, the new balsam still stands out. Its flowers resemble those of Impatiens thwaitesii, while its growth habit recalls Impatiens janthina — but no other Sri Lankan species combines the boat-shaped spurless lower sepal, the globe-like underground storage organ, and the hairless foliage. The genus holds more than 1,200 species worldwide, and Sri Lanka's known roster now runs to 28 species, 19 of them found nowhere else.

Why your camera roll matters

Here is the part worth remembering the next time you photograph a roadside flower. The journal's cover notes describe the plant's only known home as a continuously wet, seepage-fed rocky slope — meaning this new balsam is currently known from a single site. A species can be brand-new to science and already fragile. The paper includes a preliminary conservation assessment, a standard step when a plant's whole known range fits inside one waterfall valley.

Sri Lanka's flora keeps turning up surprises like this. A recent 680-page volume, Discovery: Additions to the Flora of Ceylon, added 210 species to the national floral inventory — including around 150 species never recorded before — according to Dilmah Conservation's overview of the island's newly recorded plants. That context makes the counterpoint sharper: naming a species is how it enters the record books and earns protection, but only if the habitat survives long enough.

The upside is democratic. The next new balsam could be sitting unrecognized in someone's travel photos right now, which is exactly why botanists increasingly treat social media as a frontline survey tool. Plant identification apps and citizen-science platforms turn casual snapshots into data points researchers actually use — the same pattern behind the Uluru story, where a familiar tree turned out to be a species science had been getting wrong for years. For more plant discoveries and green-thumb reading, see our Plants and Trees coverage.

So the takeaway is refreshingly low-tech: look closely, take the photo, and share it where botanists can find it. A waterfall selfie with a wildflower in frame might end up doing more for conservation than the selfie itself. And somewhere in Kithulgala's wet forest, a deep-pink balsam — new to science, older than every human who has ever admired it — keeps blooming whether or not anyone is watching.