The bedstraw family of plants (the Rubiaceae) includes wildflowers like Field madder (Sherardia arvensis) (featured in a post of that name in May 2023), and Woodruff (Galium odoratum) and Cleavers (Galium aparine) (both of which appeared in New and noticed, May 2021), but today I want to focus on the two bedstraws I’m seeing everywhere in the local fields at the moment, the yellow-flowered Lady’s bedstraw (Galium verum) and white-flowered Hedge bedstraw (Galium mollugo).

In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey writes that the flowers of Lady’s bedstraw smell strongly of honey, something I’ve never got down low enough to notice, and when dry, smells of new-mown hay, which is why it used to be stuffed into straw mattresses. Mabey also notes that this plant is ‘a coagulant and was once employed not just as a styptic, but as a vegetable substitute of rennet … in the making of cheese’.

Though I mostly see Hedge bedstraw growing alongside its yellow-flowered cousin in the local wildflower meadows, as its name implies, it is more often seen climbing amongst other plants in and around hedgerows, and in areas of low scrub. Both plants are a lovely addition to the profusion of summer flowers now in bloom.