LADY'S BEDSTRAW

Lady's Bedstraw is the next grassland flower in bloom.  Each little flower only has four petals but en masse they make quite a yellow splash.

The legend says that Mary, mother of Jesus lay on a bed of Lady's Bedstraw in the stable because everything else had been eaten by the cattle.  

Like it's relative Woodruff, it contains a lot of coumarin, which smells like new mown hay when it dries.  Coumarin can be made into the drug dicoumarol, an anti-coagulant now superseded by warfarin and other drugs.

You can get a yellow dye from the leaves and stems and a red dye from the roots, though natural dyes have nowadays given way to synthetic dyes derived from the petrochemical industries.