Nettle

“ The garden, indeed, lay beautiful in decay, for there, as everywhere in this deserted countryside, the golden ragwort had taken possession; but within the walls of the house only nettles shivered.
“You’ll always find nettles in deserted human habitations. I don’t know why,” said Mr. Ingleby. “There is a rather unusual botanical curiosity to be found among the workings at Cold Harbour,” he went on, “the Roman Nettle. Urtica . . . Urtica. . . . My memory isn’t what it used to be. It has a bigger leaf than the ordinary nettle and a much more poisonous sting. ”

“ Pistillate flowers consist of a perianth and a single carpel, surmounted by a brush-like stigma. The name of the genus is from the Latin uro, to burn, in reference to the sensation produced by the stings.
I. The Great Nettle (Urtica dioica) , is the species figured. It is our largest native nettle, and attains the height of 4 or 5 feet, the stem rising from a branching perennial rootstock which throws out runners. The large leaves are saw-edged, and apart from the stinging hairs are downy. Flower spikes given off in pairs, each spike consisting of either staminate or pistillate flowers only ”

“ I doubt whether the stinging nettle, which renders picnicking a nuisance in England, is truly indigenous; certainly the two worst kinds, the smaller nettle and the Roman nettle, are quite recent denizens, never straying, even at the present day, far from the precincts of farmyards and villages. The shepherd's-purse and many other common garden weeds of cultivation are of Eastern origin, and came to us at first with the seed-corn and the peas from the Mediterranean region. Corn-cockles and corn-flowers are equally foreign and equally artificial ”

“ THE BOY AND THE NETTLE
A BOY playing in the fields got stung by a Nettle. He ran home to his mother, telling her that he had but touched that nasty weed, and it had stung him. "It was just your touching it. my boy," said the mother, "that caused it to sting you; the next time you meddle with a Nettle, grasp it tightly, and it will do you no hurt."
Do boldly what you do at all. ”

“ Nettle, net′l, n. a common plant covered with hairs which sting sharply.—v.t. to fret, as a nettle does the skin: to irritate.—ns. Nett′le-cloth, thick japanned cotton cloth used for leather; Nett′le-fish, a jelly-fish, sea-nettle; Nett′lerash, a kind of fever characterised by a rash or eruption on the skin; Nett′le-tree, a genus of trees, with simple and generally serrated leaves, the fruit a fleshy, globose, one-celled drupe; Nett′le-wort, any plant of the nettle family. ”

“ We have omitted to mention any members of the Nettle tribe—to which, however, the hemp-plant is closely allied—as we propose to say a few special words about them.
Growing both wild and cultivated in suitable localities scattered over a large area in South-eastern Asia, there is a species of nettle to which a peculiar interest is attached. The reason of this is that the liber or inner side of its bark yields a fibre excelling every other derived from the vegetable kingdom for fineness, strength, and lustre combined. In China, this fibre is called by English-speaking people, China grass ”

“ This plant is said to have been called the Nettle of India, but I do not find it so named in Shakespeare's time.
In other points the Nettle is a most interesting plant. Microscopists find in it most beautiful objects for the microscope; entomologists value it, for it is such a favourite of butterflies and other insects, that in Britain alone upwards of thirty insects feed solely on the Nettle plant, and it is one of those curious plants which mark the progress of civilization by following man wherever he goes. ”

“ The unobservant pedestrian who may linger by the wayside to pluck something which strikes his fancy in the low hedgebank, must often have dreaded the touch of the harmless dead nettles, under the belief that these plants were the widely different, though similarly leaved, “stinging” nettles. If disabused of this impression and induced to handle a flowering stem of the purple dead nettle, with square stem and whorl of stalkless axillary blossoms, he will marvel at the singular-looking corolla, separated from its calyx of five sepals. ”

“ Net′tle, species of Urtica, a genus containing about 30 species widely distributed. The best known nettle is U. dioica, known as the stinging nettle, which is a native of Europe and Asia, but has become extensively naturalized in the United States. It is densely beset with stinging hairs. At the base of each hair is a small gland secreting a poisonous fluid. It grows from two to three feet high and is common in waste places. ”

“ How in the midst of this darkness were we to find the Jas, buried in the depth of the wood? Two plants which always follow man, Good King Henry (Chenopodium Bonus Henricus) and the nettle, served me as a clue. I swept my free hand through the air as I walked, and at each sting I knew there was a nettle and an indication. Verlot, our rearguard, made similar lunges, and supplied the want of sight by the burning stings. Our companions showed no faith in this style of research. They talked of continuing the wild descent and of returning if necessary to Bedoin. ”

“ It is a dark green, rankly growing plant, from one to two feet high, that asks no leave of anybody. It is the police that protects every flower in the hedge. To "pluck the flower of safety from the nettle danger" is a figure of speech that has especial force in this island. The species of our own nettle with which I am best acquainted, the large-leaved Canada nettle, grows in the woods, is shy and delicate, is cropped by cattle, and its sting is mild. But apparently no cow's tongue can stand the British nettle, though, when cured as hay, it is said to make good fodder. ”

“ Scarcely any beast, observes a Swedish naturalist, will touch the nettle, but fifty different kinds of insects are fed by it.950 Some of these seize upon the root, others upon the stem; some eat the leaves, others devour the seeds and flowers; but for this multitude of enemies, the nettle (Urtica dioica) , which is now found in all the four quarters of the globe, would annihilate a great number of plants. Linnæus tells us, in his "Tour in Scania," that goats were turned into an island which abounded with the Agrostis arundinacea, where they perished by famine ”

“ This herb with the vervain is supposed to form Count Mattaei's noted nostrum Febrifugo.
NETTLE. No plant is more commonplace and plentiful in our fields and hedges throughout an English summer than the familiar stinging Nettle. And yet most persons unknowingly include under this single appellation several distinct herbs. Actually as Nettles are to be found: the annual Urtica dioica, or true Stinging Nettle ”

“ It can not be doubted that the true nettle is protected by its power of stinging; and, that being so, it is scarcely less clear that the dead-nettle must be protected by its likeness to the other. Moreover, though I was fortunate in lighting on so good an illustration as that shown in the figure just when I had the opportunity of photographing it, still every one must have observed that the two species are very commonly found growing together. ”

“ Nettle tops, or the very young shoots of the nettle, may be used as a vegetable like spinach; but from the abundance of crystals (cyslaliths) they contain they are apt to be gritty, though esteemed for their anti scorbutic properties, which they do not possess in any exceptional degree. The fibre furnished by the stems of several species is used for cordage or paper making. Three species of nettle are wild in the British Isles: Urtica dioica, the common stinging nettle, which is a hairy perennial with staminate and pistillate flowers in distinct plants ”

“ There is a great deal more in nettles, I believe, than most people are apt to imagine; indeed, the nettle-philosophy at present current with the larger part of the world seems to me lamentably one-sided. As a rule, the sting is the only point in the whole organization of the family over which we ever waste a single thought. This is our ordinary human narrowness; in each plant or animal we interest ourselves about that one part alone which has special reference to our own relations with it, for good or for evil. In a strawberry, we think only of the fruit ”

“ The seeds, under pressure, yield quite a good oil. A yellow dye can be obtained by boiling the roots with alum. An excellent string can also be made from the inner bark of the stems, which has, in fact, been used to make twine and even clothing. The nettle is also valuable as an external stimulant in cases of paralysis.
A plant with so many wonderful properties would not be so common as it is, or so little disturbed, if it were not for its powerful stings.
There are one or two plants which are extremely like the nettle at first sight. ”

“ There is another Indian nettle, called Urtica heterophylla, which produces a strong, fine, white, glossy fibre. Best known by the name of the Neilgherry nettle, it is nevertheless widely diffused over India. The stem, branches, and leaves are covered with stiff sharp bristles, which give it a formidable, or, as some say, a ferocious appearance. These also inflict acute pain if they should happen to be touched, but fortunately the effect of the sting soon passes away. The prepared fibre of this plant is sometimes called vegetable wool ”

“ The nettle is almost entirely a product of urban civilization; it hangs about the streets and out-houses of small villages, the neighborhood of farm-yards, and the immediate surroundings of rural man. It lives in constant expectation, as it were, of being browsed upon by donkeys, or trampled under foot by cattle, or picked by children, or stubbed up root and all by the ruthless farmer. ”

“ What has been said of the animal world is no less true of plants. Imbedded in the protoplasm at the broad, or attached, end of the nettle hair, there lies a spheroidal nucleus. Careful examination further proves that the whole substance of the nettle is made up of a repetition of such masses of nucleated protoplasm, each contained in a wooden case, which is modified in form, sometimes into a woody fibre, sometimes into a duct or spiral vessel, sometimes into a pollen grain, or an ovule. Traced back to its earliest state, the nettle arises as the man does, in a particle of nucleated protoplasm. ”

“ This nettle is frequent all over the higher ranges of the Neilgherries. The bark yields a fine strong fibre, which the natives obtain by first boiling the whole plant, to deprive it of its virulently-stinging properties, and then peeling the stalks. The textile material thus obtained is of great delicacy and strength.—Wight's Spicelegium Neilgherense. The fibre of the Neilgherry nettle is worth 200l. a ton in England, and its cultivation is likely to be a remunerative speculation.
[404] Tribes inhabiting the Neilgherry Hills, from the rough Notes of a German Missionary. (Madras, 1856.) ”

“ Not so large. An annual; leaves smooth but for the stinging hairs, margin entire or toothed. Male flowers in panicles, female gathered in heads. Flowers larger than in dioica. Under walls and among rubbish, near habitations, chiefly in the Eastern counties, and near the sea. June to August.
III. Small Nettle (U. urens) . The familiar annual plant of fields and wastes. Leaves coarsely toothed, smooth but for stinging hairs. Panicles containing flowers of both sexes; few flowered. Flowers June to September.
Great Stinging Nettle.
Urtica dioica.
—Urticaceæ.—
Cat’s Valerian. ”

“ Well, it is a plant called nettle. Its leaves, stems, slightest branches are covered with a multitude of bristles, stiff, hollow, and filled with a venomous liquid. When one of these bristles penetrates the skin, the point breaks, the little vial of venom opens and spills its contents into the wound. From that comes a smarting but not dangerous pain. You see, the nettle’s bristles act like the weapons of venomous creatures. It is always a hollow point that makes a fine wound in the skin, and passes a drop of liquid into it, the cause of all the ill. The nettle is thus a venomous plant. ”

“ Guillim says the nettle is of so tetchie and froward a nature that no man may meddle with it, and he adds that a little girl being once stung thereby, complained to her father that there was such a curst herb in his garden, that it was worse than a dog, for it would bite them of its own house. ”

“ But the nettle has made itself a niche in nature along the bare patches which diversify human cultivation; and it has adapted its stem and leaves to the station in life where it has pleased Providence to place it. Plants like the dock, the burdock, and the rhubarb, which lift their leaves straight above the ground, from large subterranean reservoirs of material, have usually big, broad, undivided leaves, that over [213] shadow all beneath them, and push boldly out on every side to drink in the air and the sunlight. ”

“ The possible complexity of many other organic forms, seemingly as simple as the protoplasm of the nettle, dawns upon one; and the comparison of such a protoplasm to a body with an internal circulation, which has been put forward by an eminent physiologist, loses much of its startling character. Currents similar to those of the hairs of the nettle have been observed in a great multitude of very different plants, and weighty authorities have suggested that they probably occur, in more or less perfection, in all young vegetable cells. ”

“ But the nettle probably carries the same tendency to the furthest possible limit. Not content with mere defense, it is to some extent actively aggressive. The hairs which clothe it have become filled with a poisonous, irritating juice, and when any herbivore thrusts his tender nose into the midst of a clump, the sharp points pierce his naked skin, the liquid gets into his veins in the very neighborhood of the most sensitive nerves, and the poor creature receives at once a lifelong warning against attacking nettles in future. ”