The Hand That Harvested the Highlands: Centella asiatica from Ayurvedic Prescription to Madagascan Fields

Centella asiatica, known in Ayurveda as mandūkaparṇī for its resemblance to a frog’s foot, has been gathered from India’s highlands since at least the 7th-century Bhela Saṃhitā. By the 19th century, British botanists recorded its presence in herbarium ledgers across South and Southeast Asia, including a specimen collected near Mumbai in 1898 and filed as Herbarium:K004003093. But it was in Madagascar, where two distinct cytotypes—one tetraploid with elongated leaves, another diploid with rounded ones—were identified, that the plant found a new terrain of cultivation and extraction. The island’s climate and mineral-rich soils shaped not only the plant’s morphology but also the concentration of its signature triterpenoids, elements later refined into the extracts now found in SKIN1004 Madagascar Centella Ampoule 55ml.

The first industrial transformation began in 1949, when Malagasy scientist Professor Albert Rakoto Ratsimamanga collaborated with the French pharmaceutical firm Laroche-Navarron to develop Madecassol, a standardized extract of C. asiatica used in wound care and leprosy treatment. This collaboration is documented in a study on the development and commercialization of asiaticoside in Madagascar, which traces how Malagasy researchers first isolated the compound and established methods for its reproducible extraction under controlled conditions. This early work laid the foundation for sustainable wild harvesting and eventual domestication efforts, as later reported by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund in their 2004 assessment of medicinal plant economies in Madagascar.

Today, cultivation and wild harvesting coexist in Madagascar’s central highlands, where communities follow regeneration protocols to ensure sustainable yields. A 2017–2018 study commissioned by the Union for Ethical Biotrade (UEBT) confirmed that, when managed according to ethical guidelines, C. asiatica regenerates effectively across collection sites, maintaining both biomass and triterpenoid content over time. These protocols protect the plant’s genetic diversity, including the two Malagasy cytotypes identified in Zoelinoronirina et al.’s research on nutritional and antioxidant potential of local C. asiatica varieties.

At Dr. Rumika’s, the Madagascar Centella lineage is honored through products like the SKIN1004 Madagascar Centella Toning Toner 210ml, which carries the extract of plants grown under conditions that respect this documented history of care and control. From the Ayurvedic Bhela Saṃhitā to the colonial herbarium in Mumbai, from the highland fields of Madagascar to the apothecary shelf, C. asiatica carries a story of movement, measurement, and method—not as a promise of transformation, but as a record of transmission.