# Cleavers (Galium aparine) *Clivers, goosegrass, barweed, hedgeheriff, hayriffe, grip grass, catchweed, scratweed, mutton chops, robin-run-in-the-grass, loveman, goosebill, everlasting friendship; Greek *aparine*, *philanthropon*; Ojibwe *sakate’bwi*, ‘stickers’; *Galium aparine* L.* **Known today as.** *Galium aparine*, an annual hedgerow weed of the madder family, Rubiaceae, common throughout Europe and in North America. Its square stems and its whorls of six or eight narrow leaves are covered with little hooked bristles that point backwards, so that it climbs through the hedge “in a ladder-like manner,” Grieve writes, and its small round bristly seeds cling to any animal that brushes them. The whole plant, root excepted, gathered as it comes into flower, is the drug. Kind: Plant > **Caution.** None of the sources read for this entry reports poisoning. Grieve, calling it a rather powerful diuretic, advised that the juice not be given where there was a tendency to diabetes. ## What was it used for? A diuretic and a spring purifier of the blood. Grieve records it as still used in country districts as a purifier of the blood, the tops going into rural “spring drinks,” and by herbalists as an alterative for skin diseases and eruptions and as a diuretic in dropsy and stone; a tea of it was said to bring quiet sleep, and a wash of it to help sunburn and freckles. Smith found the Pillager Ojibwe making a tea of the whole plant “for a diuretic, in kidney trouble, gravel, stoppage of urine, and allied ailments.” ## What does modern science say? No European monograph covers it. The searches of Europe PMC made for this entry found laboratory studies of its extracts but no clinical trial in people. ## Pharmacognosy and toxicology - **galitannic acid**: a variety of tannic acid - **citric acid**: - **rubichloric acid**: a peculiar acid - **starch**: **Mechanism.** Not established in the sources read for this entry. **Standing.** There is no European monograph, and no clinical trial of it was found for this entry. ## What lore surrounds it? Most of its names come from its clinging, Grieve explains: *aparine* from a Greek word meaning to seize, *philanthropon*, which the Greeks gave it for the same habit, and loveman an Englishing of that; hedge-rife, an old name meaning a tax-gatherer or robber, from its way of plucking the sheep as they pass the hedge. In the fourteenth century it was called Tonguebleed, from its roughness. Linnaeus reported Swedish country people still straining milk through its stems, as Dioscorides’s shepherds had, and its roasted seeds were drunk in Sweden as a substitute for coffee. Its roots dye red, and Grieve adds that they tinge the bones of birds that eat them. ## What did the older authorities say? **Dioscorides, *De materia medica* (1st century), book 3.** Dioscorides describes its rough square branches and the leaves set round them in circles, notes that the herb sticks to clothes and that shepherds used it as a strainer to take the hairs out of milk, and gives its juice in wine for the bites of spiders and snakes, its juice in the ear for earache, and the herb with lard for glandular swellings. He records its other Greek names, among them *philanthropum*. **Culpeper, *The Complete Herbal* (1653).** Culpeper puts it under the Moon, and repeats the old use against adders: the juice and seed taken in wine help those bitten “by preserving the heart from the venom.” He adds that “it is familiarly taken in broth to keep them lean and lank, that are apt to grow fat,” and that the juice or the bruised leaves laid on a bleeding wound stay the bleeding. ## Sources - Grieve, M. *A Modern Herbal*, “Clivers.” As published on botanical.com. - Dioscorides. *De materia medica*, 3-104, in the modern English version of T. A. Osbaldeston and R. P. A. Wood (Johannesburg: Ibidis, 2000), after Goodyer’s translation of 1655. Internet Archive. - Culpeper, N. *The Complete Herbal*, “CLEAVERS.” Project Gutenberg, 49513. - Smith, H. H. (1932). *Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians*, Goose Grass. Bulletin of the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee 4. Project Gutenberg, 49527. - Grieve, M. *A Modern Herbal*, “Clivers.” As published on botanical.com. --- *Cleavers.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-17. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/cleavers Historical description, not medical advice.