Compendium

Lady's bedstraw is an upright herbaceous perennial of the family Rubiaceae, standing from about fifteen centimetres to over a metre, with fine, lance-shaped leaves set in whorls and dense clusters of tiny yellow flowers whose scent grows stronger as they dry. It grows wild across most of Europe, North Africa and temperate Asia as far as Japan, and has naturalised in Tasmania, New Zealand, Canada and the northern United States. Since ancient Greece it has stood in for rennet in cheese-making, which gave the genus its name from the Greek word for milk, and in Gloucestershire its flowers coloured Double Gloucester. In medieval Europe the dried plant was strewn to freshen houses and stuffed into mattresses, where its coumarin scent kept fleas away. It also yields yellow and red dyes, and in Denmark it flavours a spirit called bjæsk. Scandinavians, who took it as a sedative, named it Frigg's grass after the goddess who helped women in childbirth, and a bedstraw mattress was thought to ease labour and soothe mother and baby. A marriage bed of it was said to bring many children, and it went into love potions and marriage divination. In Romania it shares its name with Midsummer's Day and that day's fairies, and Serbian Midsummer wreaths woven from it are set at gates to guard the home. In magic it is hung about the house for abundance and peace, or offered to the fae on the Midsummer fire.