Nettles are a familiar sight. No wonder, they are found everywhere. They are widespread throughout Europe and North America, North Africa and in parts of Asia. To avoid too fastidious a listing, I will mention only some of their habitats.
They can be seen in Southern Norway. They were introduced in the Faroe Islands upon their settlement about AD 650. Nettles were part of the diet of Early Iron Age pastoralists of the Altai region, that encompasses the Altai Mountains on the southeast and lowlands on the northwest. The latter, commonly referred to as the Forest-Steppe Altai, geographically is part of the Western Siberian Plain.
Likewise, they were part of the Nadymsky Gorodok twelth century medieval settlement in the forest-tundra of Western Siberia. Roughly at that time, in early medieval times (12th/13th centuries), they were present as ‘economic objects’ on the site of Tartaczna in Gdańsk (N Poland). Much earlier (from the 5th century BC to the 5thcentury AD), the Early Iron Age Altai pastoralists were familiar with nettles. Yet more to the East, they are found in the Himalayas from Kashmir to Kumaon at altitudes of 2,100-3,200 m.
In the USA, stinging nettles are found in each of the 50 continental states. Hawai is the single exception. At the end of this paper, I shall state my conjecture regarding the reason for such worldwide ubiquity. Stinging nettles: the leaves carry hair that have developed into tiny hypodermic syringes. They inject a painful mix of formic acid, serotonin, histamine and acetylcholine. The pain can serve a useful purpose : Julius Caesar’s troops rubbed themselves with nettles, to keep themselves awake and alert during their northern campaigns between 58 and 45 BCE.
Queen Elizabeth I slept in a ‘nettle bed’, i.e., one with silk-smooth sheets made of nettle fabric. Nettle cloth is lustrous and smooth, similar to linen but even stronger. Napoleon’s army had ‘local’ nettle uniforms, when it invaded Central Europe.
Why such use by the military? Nettle fibers have a high tensile strength and are hollow, hence offer natural insulation inside winter uniforms. During the First World War, with sanctions imposed on cotton, the German army used nettle fabric for their soldiers’ uniforms.
In recent years textiles from nettles were reintroduced in Austria,
Germany, the UK and The Netherlands.
Uses of nettles are numerous. Textiles then, first. Stems provide the fibers. Obtaining them is labor intensive, reportedly over 50 hours to produce a 30cm by 5cm piece of fabric. Fibers are extracted from the inner bark around the stem. It is an involved process, that was presumably passed on from generation to generation: retting releases them from the bark, where they are held by pectins.
What does retting consist of? The stems need to be immerged in water for one to three weeks. Bacteria digest the pectins and the fibers are thus released from in-between the core and bark. The stems, after being carefully dried, need to be beaten with a wooden mallet on a flat surface in order to be broken. Then a thread is made most simply by splicing. And it is woven into a fabric.
Textiles from nettles have been found by archeologists. An example from American Indians is the so-called Swennes woven nettle bag, from the Oneota cultural tradition. It dates to A.D. 1250-1650. It was found in a rockshelter located in La Crosse County, Wisconsin. In the Danish Voldtofte grave, found in Lusehøj in 1861/2,, silk-like nettle cloth was used to wrap the bones of a chieftain. It was dated from between 900 and 750 BCE, i.e., during the Bronze Age. It had been imported from most probably the Kärnten- Steiermark region of Austria.
Nowadays, nettles textiles are coming back into fashion. I ascribe it to a back-to-nature urge, in our Age of the Anthropocene marked by both global warming and the decline of biodiversity. The Internet will provide you with information as to the commercial availability of nettles-based yarn. It is produced in places from Uttarakhand, India to the UK.
The expression stinging nettles is worthy of an article in itself. It has to
be seen for what it is (also), negative propaganda. Of what use? I submit: to
prevent competition of nettle fibers with first cotton and second synthetics.
Such social sterotypes, which started flourishing around the turn of the
twentieth century, indeed had and have profitability as their main function.
As food, I can draw on personal experience. We the French continue indeed to enjoy eating nettles as veggies. The favorite dish is nettle soup (soupe aux orties). To me, it is mostly a recollection from childhood, of a dish at once beautiful visually and delicious — it tastes a little spinach-like. Nettles are easily cooked. One wears gloves to pick them and one dips them, i.e., the leaves — the young ones preferably — into warm water for 15 minutes to half-an-hour, to make them wilt and lose their sting.
Health benefits from eating nettles? Rich in iron and magnesium as well as vitamins, nettles show diuretic and draining virtues and are good against arthritis. But they have numerous other medicinal uses, to which we now turn.
To sum up its health benefits, Urtica dioica shows antibacterial, antidiabetic, antioxidant, analgesic, anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antiulcer, anti-colitis, anticancer and antiAlzheimer activities. It is also active against benign prostatic hyperplasia.
An ethnobotanical investigation on Procida Island in the Mediterranean shows how to use it and for what ailments. This island is off Campania, near Naples. It belongs to the same archipelago as Ischia and Capri, but it is less on the tourist beaten track.
Nettle leaves are the main source of the active chemicals. As decoction, i.e., a herb tea, they are used as a diuretic and depurative, to relieve stress, for high blood pressure, against abdominal pain and to help pass kidney stones. Crushed leaves relieve sprains. Their juice fights urinary incontinence and, to mention another body part, nosebleeds.
To mention yet another use, that helps to understand its proximity to human settlements for times immemorial, stinging nettles were used to promote lactation, in both humans and cows. Nettles are active against cancer. Anti-proliferative and apoptotic i.e., killing tumorous cells, effects of Urtica dioica have been demonstrated on different human cancers, studied at both cellular and molecular levels.
Back to stinging nettles being found and present everywhere, from Labrador to Kamchatka — so to say. To be more accurate, here is a list of locations copied from the online site of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Altay, Amur, Assam, Austria, Baltic States, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Buryatiya, Central European Russia, China North-Central, China South-Central, Chita, Corse, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, East Aegean Islands, East European Russia, East Himalaya, Finland, France, Føroyar, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Inner Mongolia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Irkutsk, Italy, Japan, Kamchatka, Kazakhstan, Khabarovsk, Kirgizstan, Korea, Krasnoyarsk, Kriti, Krym, Lebanon-Syria, Magadan, Manchuria, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, North Caucasus, North European Russia, Northwest European Russi, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Primorye, Qinghai, Romania, Sakhalin, Sardegna, Sicilia, South European Russi, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tadzhikistan, Tibet, Transcaucasus, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkey-in-Europe, Turkmenistan, Tuva, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, West Himalaya, West Siberia, Xinjiang, Yakutskiya, Yugoslavia.
What such a long list tells us is obvious — saute aux yeux, as we the
French say (it leaps to the eyes). If stinging nettles are so widespread, it is
because of a symbiotic relationship with mankind, entered upon aeons ago. These are highly beneficial plants: as we saw, they provide not only food, also clothing and remedies for a variety of ailments.
Presence of stinging nettles is a tell-tale sign of active or abandoned human settlements. Stinging nettles have a strong association with human habitation and buildings. Our waste of refuse, ash and bones is rich in phosphate, which then builds up in the soil. Stinging nettles thrive on phosphate. Phosphate can stay in the ground for a very long time in non-acid soils, and thus their presence may indicate the existence of long abandoned settlements.
Archeologists have known this for a very long time. To quote an example from the UK, the wooded sites of Romano-British villages on the Grovely Ridge near Salisbury are still dense with nettles subsisting on the remains of an occupation by the Romans that ended 1,600 years ago.
This plant provides a textbook example of how misguided — and misguiding — conventional wisdom, common knowledge and common sense can be. All these are excuses for intellectual laziness and not bothering to think on one’s feet (so to say). Reprehensible attitudes, in short. One should heed instead the lessons from human history, they are so very obvious once they are sought!