Oldenlandia herbacea Seeds | Oldenlandia

Tiny white four-petalled flowers of Oldenlandia scattered over wiry green stems — Oldenlandia (*Oldenlandia herbacea*): Rubiaceae, damp ground across the paleotropics.

LATIN NAME: Oldenlandia herbacea

COMMON NAME: Oldenlandia

Plant Profile

Oldenlandia herbacea is a wiry annual of damp ground, fifteen to forty centimetres tall, with narrow leaves and a loose cloud of tiny four-petalled white flowers from summer into autumn. It appears in wet hollows, rice margins and disturbed ground across the paleotropics, and it is easy to overlook until it flowers, when the whole plant looks frosted. It is a plant of open, moist, sunny places, and it completes its life in a single season. The stems are square, as in the rest of the madder family, and the whole plant dries to a pale straw colour that is easy to miss against mud.

Science & Biotechnology

The genus Oldenlandia has been a taxonomic battleground for a century, with many species moved to Hedyotis and back, and the boundaries are still not settled; O. herbacea is the type of the genus, which is why the name matters beyond this one plant. It is a tetraploid and shows considerable variation in leaf shape across its range. Its chemistry has been surveyed as part of screening programmes on the madder family for iridoids and anthraquinones, though the species has no established medicinal use of its own. Its seed is minute and produced in quantity, which is how it appears so quickly on bare mud.

Uses & Benefits

It has no commercial value and no reliable medicinal record, which is worth saying plainly, because it is often confused with its relative Hedyotis diffusa, the Chinese herb bai hua she she cao, which is a different plant with a real pharmacological literature. In the garden it is a volunteer of wet ground, useful as a filler at the edge of a pond or in a bog garden, where its fine white flower is welcome and its self-sowing is not a nuisance. It also makes a decent subject for a very small container on a saucer of water. Its flowers are visited by small flies and bees, and its seed is eaten by finches, which is most of its ecological work.

Growing from Seed

Sow on the surface of a moist, fine compost and do not cover, because the seed needs light. Keep at twenty to twenty-five degrees and expect germination in two to three weeks. The seedlings are tiny and should be pricked out in clumps. Grow them in a wet, sunny corner, in soil that stays damp but not stagnant, and let the first plants set seed, after which the colony maintains itself. It is an annual, so the point is to keep the ground disturbed and open each spring rather than to nurse individual plants. It also grows happily in a crack between paving stones, which is how most people meet it.

Our Take

A small annual of wet ground with no pretensions, and one that should not be confused with the herb it resembles. Let it seed and it will come back without being asked.

Herb Seeds