Photo: Stickpen, Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)
Trailing Bacopa
Sutera cordata
Also known as Bacopa, Snowflake Bacopa, Heart-leaf Bacopa, Chaenostoma cordatum (synonym)
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Sutera cordata has no real history as a medicinal or culinary herb, and this entry treats it honestly as what it is: a beloved ornamental. In its native South African fynbos, the small heart-shaped leaves (cordata means heart-shaped) and starry white flowers scrambled quietly over rocky, sandy ground for centuries before European plant collectors took notice. It entered the nursery trade under the name Sutera in the 1990s and quickly became a staple of summer container gardens, prized simply for the generous, cloud-like drift of bloom it gives all season long. Its value has always been in the garden, not the apothecary cabinet.
How to grow & use it
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- ✦Petunia
- ✦Trailing lobelia
- ✦Verbena
- ✦Trailing lobelia
- ✦Calibrachoa
“For the basket that spills white stars over the porch rail from May clear through the first frost.”
Bacopa flowers are naturally self-cleaning, spent blooms drop away on their own, so unlike many bedding plants it never needs deadheading to keep flowering all summer.
This plant has no established food or medicinal use and no safety data for ingestion, so treat it strictly as an ornamental and keep it away from pets that nibble houseplants.