String of Hearts

Season note

Let the soil dry out about two-thirds down the pot between waterings; allow it to dry out almost completely in winter dormancy.

Overwatering signs

Yellowing leaves, leaf loss, root rot

Underwatering signs

Soft, deflated, wilted leaves

Light level

bright indirect to some direct

Best rooms

Soil

Fast-draining cactus/succulent mix

Humidity

Tolerates average household humidity

Fertilizer

Diluted balanced fertilizer monthly during spring and summer

Temperature range

15°C – 27°C

String of hearts, Ceropegia woodii, is native to southern Africa, with wild populations documented across South Africa's Cape provinces, Zimbabwe, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), and Mozambique, where the plant grows on rocky hillsides, often trailing and scrambling through other vegetation rather than climbing independently. It belongs to the dogbane family, Apocynaceae, specifically within the milkweed subfamily, Asclepiadoideae, making it a relative, somewhat unexpectedly, of Hoya. The species was formally discovered by Western botany in 1881, when John Medley Wood, curator of the Durban Botanic Gardens, found the plant hanging from rocks on Groenberg Mountain in South Africa's Western Cape at an elevation of roughly 1,800 feet; thirteen years later, in 1894, Wood sent a living specimen to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in England, from which the species gradually entered wider cultivation. The species epithet "woodii" honors Wood directly, while the genus name Ceropegia was assigned by Carl Linnaeus himself, derived from the Greek words "keros" (wax) and "pege" (fountain), intended to capture Linnaeus's visual impression of the genus's unusual, waxy, fountain-like flowers.

The plant's common name comes directly from its small, heart-shaped, succulent leaves — typically dark green marbled with silver on the upper surface and purple to green on the underside — spaced at fairly regular intervals of a few inches along thin, wiry, trailing stems that can grow several feet long, creating the plant's distinctive, string-like cascading appearance well suited to hanging baskets or trained up a small trellis. A particularly distinctive structural feature sets this species apart from many other trailing houseplants: as the vines mature, small, round, brownish tubers — sometimes described as aerial tubers or, more colloquially, "beads" — develop directly on the stem, typically at points where a leaf once was, giving rise to the plant's alternate common name, rosary vine, since the tubers spaced along the trailing stems bear a genuine resemblance to rosary beads.