Nettles with no sting in tale for green fingers
This summer has been a good one for the stinging nettle or common nettle, Urtica dioica, and definitely a bad one for bare legs and arms.
The herbaceous perennial likes to be near people. Nettles sprout on sites of old buildings, where high phosphate and nitrogen levels in the soil provide ideal growing conditions.
The leaves and stems have small hairs, which actually are capsules full of several chemicals, including formic acid. While touching the leaf, a hair, sharp like a needle, gets into your skin, then breaks down, and liquid gets injected into your skin.
But nettles have their uses. Their stems contain a fibre, which was used for making ropes, sails and fine linen cloth.
Their leaves may be used for producing permanent green dye for woollen stuffs and even for food. Nettles also act as a hair tonic and growth stimulant.
Nettles are high in iron, vitamin C, a source of calcium and magnesium. They are excellent for people who have trouble absorbing nutrition from their food.
Nettles are an important habitat for tortoiseshell butterflies, so by allowing a patch to grow in the corner of your garden, you could be doing your bit for wildlife.
Nettles make fantastic compost activator and fertiliser. A lidded bucketful of nettles covered in water and left to stew for a week or two produces an all-purpose liquid feed.
But if all that still doesn’t stop you hating Urtica dioica, you can still grow nettles – Lamium (dead-nettles) a genus of about 4050 species of flowering plants.
They are all herbaceous plants native to Europe, Asia, and northern Africa, but several have become popular as garden plants. Why? Because they have attractive, variegated foliage – and they don’t sting.
Lamium are frost hardy and grow well in most soils. The white and purple-coloured flowered species prefer full sun, while the yellow-flowered ones prefer shade, so there is a dead nettle for most sites.