Sweet-scent bedstraw

Galium triflorum, the sweet-scented bedstraw or fragrant bedstraw, is a slender, sprawling herbaceous perennial in the family Rubiaceae, with a circumboreal distribution across temperate North America, Europe and Asia, where it grows in moist, shaded deciduous and coniferous forests and along streambanks. The weak, four-angled stems trail or scramble through other vegetation to lengths of 20 to 80 centimetres and are clothed, like the leaves and fruit, in tiny backward-pointing prickles that help the plant cling. Leaves are arranged in whorls of usually six, occasionally five, narrowly elliptic to oblanceolate blades 2 to 4 centimetres long, each tipped with a short bristle and one-veined. The small, four-lobed, greenish-white to creamy flowers, about 2 millimetres across, are borne in threes (occasionally singly or in fives) on slender axillary peduncles in early to mid-summer. The fruit is a dry, two-lobed schizocarp covered in hooked bristles that readily attach to fur and clothing. Drying foliage develops a strong, sweet, coumarin-like scent of new-mown hay.