Lady’s Bedstraw, Galium verum (presumably the shorter coastal subspecies Galium verum ssp. maritimum) at Holkham NNR, North Norfolk.

Lady’s Bedstraw, Galium verum, is in flower at the moment and it seems to be doing especially well this year, perhaps as a response to last year’s hot and dry summer.

Galium verum is a perennial, stoloniferous member of the Bedstraw family, Rubiaceae (note 1). It has small, narrow leaves that grow in whorls on its angular stems and frothy heads of tiny, yellow flowers in dense clusters. It is closely related to Sweet Woodruff (Galium odoratum), which I wrote about back in March 2013. Like Sweet Woodruff, Lady’s Bedstraw smells of new-mown hay when in flower. I think Lady’s Bedstraw smells even more delectable, as it flowers in open ground the hottest summer days in July and August, when the scent is more noticeable. (Sweet Woodruff flowers in woods and hedgerows from late April to June.)

I have happy early memories of Lady’s Bedstraw. I lived in Worcestershire as a young child and we sometimes visited Witley Court, a ruined country house with extensive grounds. It was a glorious, unkempt, romantic ruin, following a fire in 1937. I remember the shell of the house and, outside, a meadow of summer flowers surrounding the silent, dry fountains. The flowers included masses of Lady’s Bedstraw, looking and smelling lovely (note 2).

The Online Atlas of the British Irish Flora gives a map and list of habitats where Lady’s Bedstraw grows: hay meadows, pastures, chalk and limestone downland, rock outcrops, quarries, coastal cliff-tops, dune grasslands and machair, roadsides and railway embankments, from sea level to 780 metres (about 2500 feet) above sea level. Subspecies maritimum grows on clifftops and sand dunes.

Outside the British Isles, Galium verum grows in mainland Europe, and parts of North Africa and Asia (note 3). In many parts of its range it is threatened by the decline of traditional farming and, in southern Finland, by hybridisation with Hedge Bedstraw (Galium album) to produce the hybrid Galium x pomeranicum.

Lady’s Bedstraw is a good wildlife plant. I’ve never seen bees on the flowers but it is a foodplant for the larvae of several species of moths (Northumberland Moths lists fifteen species). We grow Lady’s Bedstraw in our back garden, in our mini meadow, and on Wednesday a Humming-bird Hawkmoth visited and laid spherical green eggs on it. We’ll keep a look out for caterpillars later in the summer.

Galium verum is useful as well as beautiful, and the Plants For A Future website gives more details of its uses.

The English name Lady’s Bedstraw comes from the plant’s use in stuffing straw mattresses, especially in beds of women about to give birth. The plant was also used as a strewing herb, because of its lovely smell.

The leaves are edible, raw or cooked, though I haven’t tried them (note 4).

Lady’s Bedstraw also has a long history of use as a herbal medicine, including as a diuretic, in treating skin complaints and healing wounds. The plant could be gathered when in flower and dried for future use. More recently, research has been carried out on its antioxidant properties and its effect on cancer cells.

The plant can also be used to produce dyes: red from the roots and yellow from the stems, leaves and flowers. The Wild Flower Finder website gives details of the chemicals involved: the anthraquinoid dyes alizarin, purpurin, xanthopurpurin and pseudopurpurin (note 5).

The genus name Galium comes from the Greek noun gala, meaning milk. (The specific name verum means true.) Historically, Lady’s Bedstraw was used in cheese making to coagulate milk, as a vegetarian substitute for rennet. It also dyed the cheese yellow (note 6). In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey says that the technique has been lost and that research at Reading Agricultural College failed to reproduce it. More recently, others have had a try and Monica Wilde gives some recipes for plant “rennets”, including Lady’s Bedstraw, Nettle and Sorrel. Her recipe using Lady’s Bedstraw produces a cheese with the consistency of Marscapone, rather than Cheddar.

Lady’s Bedstraw is easy to identify, but if you’d like to see more pictures of the plant I recommend (as usual) the excellent Wild Flower Finder, First Nature and (Finnish) NatureGate websites.

I can recommend growing Lady’s Bedstraw in a wild flower meadow, in a sunny place. (It could grow too rampant in a flower bed.) The plant does well on calcareous soils, but also on the neutral but sandy soil in our back garden and on our allotment. One of our plants came in a pot from Natural Surroundings and the others grew (more slowly) from seed in a meadow mix from Emorsgate Seeds, who also sell the seeds separately. In their fifth year, all are doing very well.

Lady’s Bedstraw with a very blurry Humming-bird Hawkmoth. Back garden, 3rd July 2019.

Notes

Note 1 – The Rubiaceae is the fourth-largest family of angiosperms (flowering plants). Worldwide, there are about 13,500 species of Rubiaceae in 611 genera. British species are  annual or perennial herbs, many of which scramble over or through surrounding vegetation. But in the sub-tropics the family contains shrubs, including Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora, which give us coffee, and trees, including Cinchona, which gives us quinine to prevent malaria and flavour tonic water.

Note 2 – I haven’t been back to Witley Court since the early 1970s, but the website shows that the grounds have been restored and I wonder whether the Lady’s Bedstraw and other lovely flowers have gone in the tidy up. I hope not.

Note 3 –  Ali Esmail Al-Snafi, in “Galium Verum – A Review”, Indo Am. J. P. Sci, 2018; 05(04), the following countries are listed:

• In Africa: Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia;
• In Asia: Armenia, Azerbaijan,Georgia, Russian Federation, China, Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Pakistan;
• In Europe: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, France, Portugal and Spain.

Note 4 – A couple of years ago I did try cooking Lady’s Bedstraw’s close relative Cleavers or Goosegrass, Galium aparine, but it was revolting, like over-stewed tea but nastier. (In all fairness, it tasted much better raw.)

Note 5 – Purpurin and alizarin also occur in the dye plant Common Madder, Rubia tinctorum. This is sometimes naturalised in the UK. The related Wild Madder, Rubia peregrina, is a British native, mostly in the south-west. Rubia tinctorum is the source of the dye rose madder. Which reminds me of a limerick:

“While Titian was mixing rose madder,
His model reclined on a ladder.
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition,
So he leapt up the ladder and had ‘er.”

(If you want to be distracted further, there are variations on this theme, involving other pigments, in the Jim McWilliam Collection of Limericks. But if you find this offensive, my apologies – please go back to the main text.)

Note 6 – Nowadays Cheddar cheese is dyed with annatto, from the South American Achiote tree, Bixa orellana.