#galium

Common milkweed and hedge bedstraw.

Plant of the Day

Sunday 28 July 2024

In summer this meadow in Orkney was full of the 'frothy' flowers of Galium verum (lady's bedstraw) and the air was full of a sweet, honey-like scent. This perennial has been used in the past to stuff and scent mattresses.

AKA clivers, catchweed, robin-run-the-hedge, sweetheart, hitchhikers, bedstraw, small goosegrass, sticky willy, stickyweed, sticky bob, stickybud, stickyback, sticky molly, sticky willow, stickyjack, stickeljack, sticky grass, grip grass, bobby buttons, whippysticks, and velcro plant. As you might guess the fruit are spread when they attach to a passing animals fur.

Galium was Ancient Greek physician and botanist Dioscorides’ name for the plant, derived from the Greek for ‘milk’, because the flowers of Galium verum were used in cheese making. Aparine was used by Ancient Greek naturalist Theophrastus, and means means 'clinging'.

Native to much of Eurasia and North Africa, and a noxious weed everywhere else. Naturalised in NZ since at least 1870.

In the same family as coffee, and the fruit has been used as a substitute. The leaves are also edible, but the hooked hairs make the raw leaves unpalatable. It was also used as mattress stuffing, and the roots for a permanent red dye.

Eating Weeds: Cleavers Coffee

One of the world’s most beloved beverages comes from a species of plant found in the fourth largest family of flowering plants. Rubiaceae, also known as the coffee or bedstraw family, consists of around 13,500 species, placing it behind just Asteraceae, Orchidaceae, and Fabaceae for the most number of species. Coffea arabica, and other species in the genus Coffea, are grown for their fruits which…