Galium debileDesv.

Slender Marsh-bedstrawcommon marsh bedstraw

WFO wfo-0000968810 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Galium debile, photographed by Aleksei Baushev
fig. a Aleksei Baushev, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205238320

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
05049148
Filed as
Galium debile Desv.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
not recorded
Origin
not recorded
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 24 botanical countries

Regions where Galium debile is native: Algeria, Morocco, East Aegean Is., Lebanon-Syria, North Caucasus, Transcaucasus, Türkiye, Albania, Baleares, Bulgaria, Corse, France, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Kriti, Krym, NW. Balkan Pen., Portugal, Romania, Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain AlgeriaMoroccoEast Aegean Is.Lebanon-SyriaNorth CaucasusTranscaucasusTürkiyeAlbaniaBulgariaCorseFranceGreeceHungaryItalyKritiKrymNW. Balkan Pen.PortugalRomaniaSiciliaSpain BalearesSardegna
Native distribution of Galium debile, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Baleares BAL
Bulgaria BUL
Corse COR
France FRA
Great Britain GRB
Greece GRC
Hungary HUN
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
Krym KRY
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Portugal POR
Romania ROM
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
East Aegean Is. EAI ASIA-TEMPERATE
Lebanon-Syria LBS
North Caucasus NCS
Transcaucasus TCS
Türkiye TUR
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Morocco MOR

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 601 in flower of 669 examined

Proportion of examined Galium debile in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 73 73 100% 95% to 100%
Feb 26 26 100% 87% to 100%
Mar 8 10 80% 49% to 94%
Apr 5 9 56% 27% to 81%
May 16 28 57% 39% to 73%
Jun 223 234 95% 92% to 97%
Jul 104 110 95% 89% to 97%
Aug 22 42 52% 38% to 67%
Sep 1 11 9% 2% to 38%
Oct 2 3 too few examined
Nov 20 21 95% 77% to 99%
Dec 101 102 99% 95% to 100%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Galium debile 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. 601 of 669 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 2,034 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -19.0 °C -10.7 °C 3.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 18.3 °C 22.8 °C 25.8 °C
Annual rainfall 484 mm 681 mm 1,457 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 69 mm 109 mm 279 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,034 research-grade observations of Galium debile 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 30 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 aragonesii Sennen
  • Galium congestum Jord.
  • Galium constrictum Chaub. ex St.-Amans
  • Galium constrictum var. angustifolium Pau
  • Galium constrictum var. congestum (Jord.) Bég.
  • Galium constrictum var. congestum (Jord.) Nyman
  • Galium constrictum var. creticum (Boiss. & Heldr.) Nyman
  • Galium constrictum var. debile (Desv.) Nyman
  • Galium constrictum var. rhiphaeum Pau & Font Quer
  • Galium constrictum var. riphaeum Pau & Font Quer
  • Galium creticum Boiss. & Heldr.
  • Galium debile f. submersum Glück
  • Galium debile f. terrestre Glück
  • Galium debile var. congestum (Jord.) Gren.
  • Galium debile var. humile Lange
  • Galium elongatum subsp. debile (Desv.) Batt.
  • Galium fruticosum Sieber ex Boiss.
  • Galium junceum Heldr. ex Boiss.
  • Galium krymense Pobed.
  • Galium palustre Pourr. ex Willk. & Lange
  • Galium palustre subsp. constrictum (Chaub. ex St.-Amans) Corb.
  • Galium palustre subsp. debile (Desv.) Berher
  • Galium palustre var. congestum (Jord.) Rouy
  • Galium palustre var. constrictum (Chaub.) Rouy

and 6 more.

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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. 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.