Stickywilly Galium aparine
Stickywilly is an annual vine native to Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 0.9 ft and blooms Apr in full sun, with brown fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Galium aparine, with common names including cleavers, clivers, catchweed, robin-run-the-hedge, goosegrass, and sticky willy, is an annual, herbaceous plant of the family Rubiaceae. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.4–7.2
- Fertility need
- High
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 13+
- Height
- 0.9 ft
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Single crown
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~19 caterpillar species
Galium supports ~19 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Galium in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 12 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Galium is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
12 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Stickywilly :
Wildlife & visitors 54 birds · 6 mammals · 4 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Stickywilly — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 54 birds and 6 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
4 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 64 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Stickywilly, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Galium →
How we know this (4) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
We place each species on Grime’s competitor–stress-tolerator–ruderal (C–S–R) triangle using the globally-calibrated “StrateFy” method: leaf size drives the competitor score, dense low-area leaves the stress-tolerator score, and thin high-area leaves the ruderal score. The result is a C/S/R percentage mix and one of 19 strategy classes; we show it in plain words and keep the percentages for the curious.
Honest limits: A species-mean strategy from pooled global leaf measurements — a broad ecological signal, not a precise per-plant or per-site value. Derived, never a measured fact.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (38) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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