Skinny straggling creeping stems with whorls of leaves about them stick to anything even themselves. Their hooked barbs give it an unpleasant coarse feel like horsetail with its silicates and may cause a rash. It’s nontoxic; in fact you can eat it raw or steamed or dry, roast, and grind its seeds since it’s in the same family as coffee, but it’s an unattractive plant that climbs over the hedges. It’s also called clivers, and bedstraw because people used to stuff mattresses with it, bobby buttons, catchweed, grip grass, goosegrass because geese eat it, robin-run-the-hedge, stickyweed, sticky bob, stickybud, stickyback, sticky willy, sticky willow, stickyjack, stickeljack, sticky grass, and velcro plant. Each long strand is connected to the earth by the thinnest hair as though it were ready to slither away like a snake.
Weeds