Southern Wetland Flora
Field Office Guide to Plant Species
Bacopa caroliniana (Walter) B. Rob.
- Family: Snapdragon (Scrophulariaceae)
- Flowering: May-September
- Field Marks: This usually aquatic species is distinctly aromatic with opposite leaves and small bractlets at the base of each blue flower.
- Habitat: Wet sandy ditches, shores, stream banks, around ponds and lakes, swamps, usually in shallow water.
- Habit: Perennial herb with rhizomes, often forming extensive mats.
- Stems: Floating, creeping, or ascending, hairy, the upright part up to 1 foot tall.
- Leaves: Opposite, simple, ovate, rounded at the tip, clasping at the base, dotted, aromatic, up to 1 inch long, up to 1/2 inch wide, without teeth, sparsely hairy on the veins of the lower surface.
- Flowers: Solitary in the axils of the leaves, the stalks very short at first but lengthening as the fruit develops; each flower with a pair of small bractlets at its base.
- Sepals: 5, green, some of them ovate and up to 1/4 inch long, the others linear and shorter.
- Petals: 5, blue, united, up to 1/2 inch long.
- Stamens: 4, the longer 2 exserted from the corolla.
- Pistils: Ovary superior.
- Fruits: Capsules ovoid, up to 1/4 inch long; seeds grayish brown, distinctly veiny.
- Notes: This plant is often called lemon-scented bacopa because of the lemony smell given off from crushed leaves.
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