Garden Pharmacy – Gotu Kola

There are two, quite different plants known as Brahmi – Brahmi/gotu kola (Centella asiatica) and Brahmi/water hyssop (Bacopa monnieri). Both of them are medicinal. I don’t have water hyssop growing – after this bit of research I might look out for it – but I do have gotu kola growing. I’ve found it does well in pots and hanging baskets, and after this bit of research, I might give it another one or two pots because I think it is a plant I will like to have around.

Gotu kola is native to wet areas in tropical and subtropical south and east Asia and the South Pacific, where it has been used as a food for a very long time. It’s also been used in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years. And like most plant based foods, it has anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties at the very least, and lots of vitamins and minerals, so it’s useful just for general health. But gotu kola has a couple of very nice additional medicinal properties with a decent amount of Western style evidence to back them up.

The one that it is renouned for is improving mental clarity, cognition, memory, brain power. There’s animal studies that show it improving cognition and memory and clinical evidence of it helping people with age related dementia, Alzheimers and Parkinson’s. It appears to be both neuroprotective and neuroregenerative (that is, both protecting against and healing injury to brain cells caused by inflammation), and preventing the formation of the amyloid plaques characteristic of Alzheimers.

I quite like my brain, so I’m keen on protecting it. Gotu kola is used as a food so it’s hard to overdo it. The traditional medicinal doseage is just a couple of leaves a day, and there’s clinical evidence that a mug or two of gotu kola tea – just a couple of teaspoons of shredded leaf in a teapot – is enough to have an effect. But I’ve also seen studies that suggest that the active ingredients are most soluble in alcohol. So perhaps I am better off adding a few leaves to a gin and tonic. It might at least counter the effect of the alcohol on my memory and cognition.

Gotu kola is also useful as a wound-healing agent for cuts, scratches, burns, sores and skin irritation. It promotes collagen formation and helps skin grow back over a wound without scarring. Women in south-east Asia swear by mashed leaves, perhaps mixed with aloe vera and/or almond oil as a night cream, and to prevent stretch marks.

The third medicinal use that stood out for me was healing varicose veins, and preventing blood and fluid leaking out of veins that have lost elasticity. Cosmetically this includes the little spider veins that are targetted by the IPL and laser industries, but more signigicantly, it looks like it could be useful for people whose feet swell when travelling, or who need an ottoman to put their feet up on of an evening.

Centella asiatica, family Apiaceae (Umbelliferae), Gotu kola (Brahmi)

 Gotu kola is a member of the Umbelliferae (now correctly called Apiaceae apparently), the same family as carrots and parsley. But it looks and grows very differently. Gotu kola is a perennial creeping groundcover that sends down roots from nodes and likes wet soil to the point of swampy. I bought mine as a potted seedling, and you can propagate by anchoring a root node to the soil and separating it when it has sent down roots. Or grow from seed.

It likes wet conditions and won’t cope with drying out and though it grows dense in full sun, mine does quite fine in almost full shade, which makes keeping it moist much easier. It’s an attractive plant for a hanging basket or a pot, with trailing vines, rich green leaves and tiny pink flowers. In a pot you can keep it on a deck or verandah, somewhere handy for plucking a couple of leaves a day. It would also do well as a groundcover or a rockery plant, or occupying the lower levels of a herb spiral.

Word of warning: Gotu kola has been investigated for bioremediation of soils contaminated by heavy metals, because it picks up heavy metals and translocates them to its leaves. On the plus side, growing a dense mat of it and removing the leaves from your site could be a way of fixing lead contamination. On the minus side, if you have or suspect heavy metal contamination, it’s the wrong plant to grow for improving memory and cognition.

Another word of warning: There seem to be a lot of images on the internet of things that are not Centella asiatica. In particular, I see lots of dollarweed (Hydrocotyle spp) labelled as gotu kola, and it’s not. Check the differences and be careful with identification.

Most of the references I found by following references from this link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116297/

You will find the rest of this series by clicking the tag Medicinals.