Gotu Kola

Gotu kola is a creeping perennial herb of the carrot family, native to tropical Africa, Asia, Australia and the islands of the western Pacific, and at home in swampy ground. Slender green or reddish runners link one plant to the next and carry long-stalked, rounded leaves, while the tiny white or crimson flowers sit in small clusters close to the soil. The whole plant, roots included, is gathered by hand about three months after planting. It also goes by Indian or Asiatic pennywort, spadeleaf and coinwort, and older books, Cunningham among them, file it under the former botanical name Hydrocotyle asiatica. Across South and South-east Asia it is a vegetable as much as a herb: in Sri Lanka it is chopped into malluma to eat with rice and cooked into a porridge, in Myanmar it makes a salad, and in Thailand it is sold as a drink. Traditional medicine has used it for skin complaints and minor wounds, though clinical research has not shown it to work or to be safe for them. The AHPA handbook notes that in north and west India it is one of the plants called brahmi, a name that elsewhere belongs to Bacopa. In magic Cunningham gives it a single power, meditation, and burns a little in incense before, but not during, a session.