Bedstraws of several related species produce a red or purple dye which many tribes extracted by boiling the roots.
As a medicinal tea, leaves and stems of the northern bedstraw were used for urinary tract problems. In Europe where bedstraw is called cleavers, the tea was taken to treat and prevent kidney stones and other urinary maladies.
The crushed stems and leaves are applied directly to any suppurating (oozing, pussy, ulcerated) skin condition. It is quite effective combined with crushed False Solomon’s Seal (Smilacina racemosa) against “sun bumps” (called lichenosis in Scotland), a common irritating skin condition of hikers in high mountain ranges.
Bedstraw was used in many parts of the world as mattress filler or bedding straw due to its habit of producing great quantities of sticky vine-like mats of interwoven stems that could be easily bundled in quantity, thus the name bedstraw.
It has been passed down through time that the straw in the manger in Bethlehem where the Christ child was born was a bedstraw (Galium verum) “lady’s bedstraw”.
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