Flora of New Zealand Series

slender bedstraw

Annual; stems slender or filiform, much-branched, obtusely 4-angled, scabridulous, forming tangled masses to c. 30 cm long; rootstock slender. Lvs and stipules in whorls of 6, sessile, 2-9-(11) × 0.5-1.5-(2) mm, linear-lanceolate, narrow-elliptic, or oblanceolate, shining, usually revolute; margins and sometimes midrib beneath, as well as upper surface, densely antrorsely scabridulous; apex mucronate or shortly awned. Fls axillary and terminal, forming a rather narrow, loose panicle; cymes few-flowered, divaricating, glabrous or nearly so, subtended by leaflike bracts; peduncles long, filiform; pedicels < peduncles, to 3 mm long, ± deflexed at fruiting. Corolla 0.4-1 mm diam., greenish inside, reddish outside; lobes ovate, acute. Mericarps 0.5-1-(1.3) mm diam., subglobose to reniform, finely papillate, occasionally sparsely clothed in appressed hairs.

N.: most common in northern areas; S.: Nelson and eastern areas S. to Otago, up to c. 500 m.

S. and C. Europe 1883

Especially poor stony pastures, but sometimes common in waste and stony places, particularly roadsides, railway tracks, dry banks, building sites, as well as dry riverbeds, open or new surfaces, coastal and inland cliffs and steep slopes.

FL Nov-Apr.

This plant has usually been known in N.Z. as G. parisiense L., but this very closely related sp. has pedicels as long as the peduncles and the pedicels are spreading at fruiting. However, some N.Z. plants with pedicels not always deflexed at fruiting and peduncles c. 5 mm long approach the true G. parisiense. Allan (1940) mentioned a bristly-fruited var. of G. parisiense occasionally found in N.Z. but no specimens have been located. G. divaricatum has also been previously recorded in N.Z. as G. parisiense subsp. divaricatum (Lam.) Rouy et Camus.