White bedstraw

Galium album, the hedge bedstraw or white bedstraw, is a sprawling to ascending perennial herb of the family Rubiaceae growing 30 to 120 cm long, with slender, smooth, four-angled stems that often clamber over surrounding vegetation. The narrow, single-veined leaves are arranged in whorls of six to eight along the stem, each tipped with a fine point. From early to late summer the plant bears large, branched, airy panicles of numerous small four-petalled white flowers. The fruit is a small smooth twin nutlet. Native across Europe, North Africa and western Asia and naturalised elsewhere, hedge bedstraw grows in meadows, grassy banks, hedgerows, scrub and woodland margins, frequently on neutral to calcareous soils. It belongs to a complex of closely related white-flowered bedstraws.