False cleavers

Galium spurium, the false cleavers or stinkweed bedstraw, is a slender weak-stemmed annual herb in the family Rubiaceae native to Europe and temperate Asia and now widely naturalized as a weed of cultivated fields, particularly canola/rapeseed and cereal crops, across temperate North America and elsewhere. The plant is morphologically very similar to the common cleavers Galium aparine and is sometimes treated as a variety of it; it differs principally in its smaller flowers and fruits and in its almost smooth (not hooked) fruits in some forms. Stems are square in cross-section, slender, 30-100 cm long, weak and scrambling over neighbouring vegetation, with small downward-pointing prickles on the angles that cause the plant to cling lightly to fabric and other surfaces. Leaves are borne in whorls of 6-8 at each node, narrowly lanceolate to oblanceolate, 1-3 cm long, with backward-hooked prickles on the margins and midrib, sessile, and 1-veined. The inflorescence is a small few-flowered axillary cyme of 1-5 minute pale greenish-white to creamy-yellowish flowers, each only 1-2 mm across, with a four-lobed corolla. The fruit is a small (1-2.5 mm) two-lobed schizocarp, the two mericarps either smooth or sparsely armed with very short slender bristles or hooked hairs.