Although Goosegrass has nothing else in common with Burdock it resembles it in the fact that its fruit “sticketh closer than a brother.” It is a plant of the hedge, where it forms dense masses, the whole plant—stem, leaves and fruits—being covered with flinty hooks. The rambling botanist, when playfully inclined, detaches a yard-length from the hedge and deftly throwing it against his unconscious companion’s back, causes a hundred hooks to catch in the warp or weft of his coat. It belongs to the Bedstraws, a genus comprising nearly a dozen British species, and distinguished by having minute flowers, yellow, white or greenish, calyx minute, a mere ring, the corolla four or five-lobed, honeyed. Stamens four, styles two, united at their bases. The leaves are borne in whorls of from four to ten, at distant intervals on the square stem. In G. aparine the leaves vary from six to eight, the flower-cymes arise from their axils, the flowers are white, the fruit first green then becoming purplish. Flowers June and July.