Perennial herb with a creeping rhizome 10 - 40 cm tall

Leaves: mostly in whorls of four, a few in whorls of five or six, 5 mm - 2 cm long, linear to narrowly elliptic with a blunt tip, one-veined, often roughly hairy along the margins and sometimes on the midrib beneath.

Flowers: mostly solitary on an elongated (over 6 mm long), arched, rough stalk, axillary or terminal, whitish, 1 - 1.5 mm wide, more or less flat and circular in outline, with three short, blunt lobes. Stamens four, shorter than corolla. Styles two, short.

Fruit: dry, indehiscent, 1 - 2 mm long, spherical, paired, separating when ripe, one-seeded.

Stems: numerous, weak, often scrambling over other plants, slender, four-angled, often much branched, roughly hairy on the angles or essentially hairless.

Similar species: No information at this time.

Flowering: mid-June to late September

Habitat and ecology: Found in calcareous marshes, bogs, and other moist areas.

Occurence in the Chicago region: native

Etymology: Galium comes from the Greek word gala, meaning milk, referring to the plants that are used to curdle milk. Trifidum means three-cleft.

Author: The Morton Arboretum

Very local; in marshes and bogs. There are 18 reports of it from south of the lake area. I believe all of these reports should be referred to some other species although we now have two specimens from south of the lake area. One from Jefferson County and another which was collected by Wilson in Hamilton County in 1899 now in the herbarium of DePauw University. The books used by the early botanists did not enable them to easily separate this species from those closely allied to it, and that fact may have been responsible for some of the early reports.