This is a perennial plant growing in spreading clumps in shady places and with very pale yellow –greenish flowers, too small to be very distinctive. It dies back in winter, small stem and bud parts overwintering at ground level.

Though inconspicuous individually, the plants create a distinctive effect when flowering in large masses. The regular cross-shaped arrangement of 4 oval, pointed leaves at each node with sections of square- profiled hairy stem between makes it easily recognisable.

The flowers have a scent of honey and attract bees.

Galium verum is a low scrambling plant, with the rounded, short-haired stems growing to 60–120 centimetres long, frequently rooting where they touch the ground, sometimes even growing underground, close to the surface. The backwards-angled branches help the plant support itself on surrounding vegetation.

Leaves are needle-like and borne in whorls of 8 to 12. They are well adapted to dryness, becoming darker in periods of drought.

Flowers are tiny, lemon-yellow, and produced in masses of dense clusters with a sweet, honey-like smell. It is an important food-provider plant for bees.

Yellow Bedstraw has been used to make red and yellow dyes, to colour Double Gloucester cheese and, traditionally in Scandinavia, as a sedative used to aid women in childbirth.

Stems are erect, branched and square in profile, sometimes woody, forming rhizomes as organs for overwintering and vegetative propagation.

Leaves are dark green, narrow (3 to 6mm wide), narrowing towards the tip, with margins rolled down slightly, arranged in 4's in a cross shaped arrangement at the nodes.

There are usually many small white flowers at the tips of many branches forming an overall mass of flowers in an egg or pyramid shaped inflorescence.

Small (2.5mm) fruits usually covered with hooked bristles.