Water well to ensure beautiful bacopa fills and spills

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/08/2015 (3676 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Call them spillers or call them fillers — whatever name you give them, bacopa plants seem to be everywhere these days. This trailing annual plant has taken the gardening world by storm and most gardeners include at least some of these wonderful plants in their containers.

Bacopa is native to the wet regions of South Africa and if it has a downside, it is that it will not perform well if it is allowed to dry out. Strangely enough, when it does dry out, it doesn’t necessarily wilt and look droopy — which is troublesome because this common sign of when we need to water a plant is absent and we may not water when we should.

Instead of wilting, bacopa plants will lose their flowers when they dry out and then it will take two to three weeks before the plants will bloom again. It is vital, therefore, to keep the planting medium consistently moist when you grow bacopa.

Because of its dislike for dry soil, bacopa is best suited to larger containers. It can be planted into the ground and used as a ground cover, but it will have to be watered regularly, even when it is not used in containers.

Bacopa is a heavy feeder and should be fertilized regularly during the growing season. Adding peat moss or other organic matter to the planting medium will allow the soil to retain moisture more readily and prevent it from drying out as easily.

Bacopa is a trailing plant with finely textured foliage that cascades nicely over the sides of containers. Its stems will get quite long — up to 70 centimetres — by summer’s end. Some people trim longer stems to keep the plants more compact and to maintain an attractive shape.

The blooms are small, perfectly formed five-petal flowers that come in white, pink, lavender, blue and coral. White was the original colour and ‘Giant Snowflake’ was the original variety, and it had larger flowers than many of the newer varieties.

There is even a variety of bacopa that has variegated gold and green foliage. ‘Olympic Gold’ will add beauty to a container because of its pretty white flowers as well as its spectacular foliage.

Bacopa has an aggressive growth habit and will easily hold its own in a mixed container or when coupled with other fast growing plants. Its cascading branches will find their way between the branches of other plants and will also trail below the foliage of its companions.

Using bacopa in a container adds unity to a composition because the colour of the bacopa flowers and the green of the dainty foliage will tie the whole design together, even if it consists of plants with several different bloom colours. This is the main reason for using a filler plant besides filling gaps in the design.

Sometimes the cascading branches of bacopa get so densely stacked one upon another that the ones underneath lack light and sometimes die. Removal of these dead branches will keep the container looking attractive and prevent the dead stems from encouraging the onset of disease.

What plants are best to combine with bacopa? Verbena — particularly the trailing kind — combine well with bacopa. Using a bacopa colour that contrasts to the flower colour of the verbena will create a good effect.

Geraniums — and other plants with a more upright growth habit — benefit from being combined with bacopa because it will hide the bare bottoms of the plants and also will act as a spiller to increase the attractiveness of the container. Bacopa also can be used with tuberous begonias.

You would think that petunias, particularly the miniature types that are so popular nowadays in hanging baskets, would overwhelm a filler in a container. But bacopa seems to be able to cope with the aggressive nature of the petunias and the result is a basket of petunias with bacopa intermingled with the petunia blooms throughout the basket and cascading down below the petunias.

Bacopa is not particularly prone to disease or insect problems. Aphids sometimes will be a problem, but no more so than with many other common garden plants and they are easily controlled.

By this time of year, hanging baskets and containers are fully developed, and if you keep an eye out for sightings of bacopa as you are out and about, you will see some interesting combinations and some unique ways that gardeners have used bacopa in containers of all kinds.

Because of its beauty, bacopa is surely a filler — or spiller — that will not soon disappear from the gardening scene.