Tag Archives: Hedge bedstraw

Two bedstraws

05 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in plants, wildflowers

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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.

201/366 Small and white

19 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by in nature, wildflowers

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Many of the local wildflowers currently in bloom have small, white flowers. These are some of them …

200719 fairy flax

Fairy flax (Linum catharticum): this is the smallest, a tiny delicate plant that appears to shake and quiver even in the lightest breeze. It is also known as Purging flax as, in past times, herbalists prescribed it as a laxative.

Hedge bedstraw (Galium mollugo): not the bedstraw that was used to sweeten the smell of straw mattresses (which is the yellow-flowered Lady’s bedstraw), but its close cousin, which can be found scrambling along hedgerows, particularly on calcareous soils.

Eyebright (Euphrasia sp.): I didn’t know until I checked this plant on the Plantlife website that the various species of Eyebright are semi-parasitic, stealing the nutrients of other plants, like grasses.

200719 common mouse ear

Common mouse-ear (Cerastium fontanum): A type of chickweed, which many gardeners will know as a persistent ‘weed’, this little plant gets its mouse-ear name from its hairy leaves that grow in pairs on either side of the plant’s stem.

200719 common centaury (1)

Common centaury (Centaurium erythraea) is usually pink flowered (see the variations below) but many of the plants I see locally, like those above, have white flowers. The Plantlife website gives the fascinating information that centaury is ‘named after the centaur Chiron, who, according to legend, discovered its healing power and used it to cure himself from the effects of a poisoned arrow.’