Licorice Bedstraw Galium circaezans
Licorice Bedstraw is a perennial shrub native to Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It blooms May – Aug. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Galium circaezans, common name licorice bedstraw or wild licorice, is a plant species in the family Rubiaceae. It is native to the eastern half of the United States from the Great Plains to the Atlantic, plus Quebec and Ontario. There are also a few isolated populations in Washington state, probably adventive. Galium circaezans was originally described by André Michaux in Flora Boreali-Americana. It is also known as white licorice, forest bedstraw, and more. Galium circaezans is a weedy, herbaceous perennial or subshrub. It is native to Central and Eastern North America. Other synonyms of Galium circaezans include Galium brachiatum Muhl. (Illegitimate), Galium circaeoides Roem. & Schult, and Galium rotundifolium var. circaezans (Michx.) Kuntze. Galium circaezans is not threatened to go extinct. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Green AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos — lower-confidence (a more subjective call, often an inconspicuous flower); not a botanical record
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
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.
Across 227 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Licorice Bedstraw, 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 (3) 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 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.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (23) 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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