CLEAVERS (Rough Bedstraw) 

 Galium apacine L. 



Summer Cleavers is the largest of the bedstraws in Illinois. It is a 

 Woods coarse, harsh plant with long, weak, reclining or ascending 

 stems along whose many ridges are innumerable saw-teeth. 

 These rasp and tear at bare flesh or clothing as a hiker walks inadvisedly 

 through a tangle of bedstraw. The plants are so massed and so well 

 armed that ])ortions of the stems tear away from the plants and are car- 

 ried oif on clotliing. 



Along the stem are leaf-whorls which ;n-o three to four inches in 

 diameter with six to eight long, narrow, ro\igh leaves. 



Cleavers is found as part of that low gTowth which grows in damp 

 places in the woods and swamp edges. In company with jewelweeds, 

 nettles, and docks, the bedstraw fills large areas with its pale green 

 jungle of tangled stems. Here among them the nuillards from the 

 swamp may waddle about to pick up the remains of the paired seeds in 

 autmnn, or iind a place to bed down for a siesta in the sun. Bedstraw is 

 easily trampled, so that the resting places of wild things is easily seen 

 among the stems. Yet it was not because animnls might sleep in the bed- 

 straw, but for quite another reason that it was given its name. Legend 

 long ago said that tliis coarse and [jrickly "straw" was used in Europe to 

 fill mattresses, and that the Holy Family rested in a patch of Galium. 



