Galium angustifoliumNutt.

narrowleaf bedstraw

WFO wfo-0001132214 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Galium angustifolium, photographed by velodrome
fig. a velodrome, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 204280763

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Regions where Galium angustifolium is native: California, Mexico Northwest CaliforniaMexico Northwest
Native distribution of Galium angustifolium, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
California CAL NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Northwest MXN

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 141 in flower of 286 examined

Proportion of examined Galium angustifolium in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 6 13 46% 23% to 71%
Feb 3 7 43% 16% to 75%
Mar 4 13 31% 13% to 58%
Apr 36 48 75% 61% to 85%
May 38 46 83% 69% to 91%
Jun 32 54 59% 46% to 71%
Jul 11 27 41% 25% to 59%
Aug 2 27 7% 2% to 23%
Sep 2 17 12% 3% to 34%
Oct 2 14 14% 4% to 40%
Nov 2 9 22% 6% to 55%
Dec 3 11 27% 10% to 57%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Galium angustifolium observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 141 of 286 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,004 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -1.6 °C 6.3 °C 9.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 24.0 °C 28.8 °C 32.5 °C
Annual rainfall 277 mm 349 mm 596 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 4 mm 5 mm 25 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,004 research-grade observations of Galium angustifolium that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 10 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Galium angustifolium var. bernardinum Hilend & J.T.Howell
  • Galium angustifolium var. diffusum Hilend & J.T.Howell
  • Galium angustifolium var. foliosum Hilend & J.T.Howell
  • Galium angustifolium var. onycense Dempster
  • Galium angustifolium var. siccatum (W.Wight) Hilend & J.T.Howell
  • Galium angustifolium var. typicum Hilend & J.T.Howell
  • Galium gabrielense Munz & I.M.Johnst.
  • Galium siccatum W.Wight
  • Galium siccatum var. anotinum Jeps.
  • Galium trichocarpum Nutt.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol GAAN2. public domain. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.