Why we should all learn to love stinging nettles

Aimee Brett, Nottingham Trent University

Thinking of stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) may bring to mind childhood memories of legs burning as you whizzed down country lanes on your bike. Or itchy white bumps blooming on your hands and even face as you foraged blackberries from the hedgerow.

As an adult, you may have fresher memories of the pain from trying to weed persistent nettles from your garden. As soon as you think you’ve got them all, they spring up again like difficult relatives at Christmas.

Stinging nettles are not high on many people’s lists of favourite plants. But there’s so much more to this nettlesome species than people realise.

Let’s start with the basics. Nettles are amazing colonisers of bare and disturbed ground. Their long-lived seeds can lay dormant in the soil for five years or possibly more. And those rhizomatous (interconnected) roots that make them so hard to cull from your flowerbeds are something of a plant superpower that helps them quickly establish new populations.

Charles Darwin’s theory that nettle seeds could survive a long soak in salty water while using the sea to disperse them turned out to be right. A study in 2018 found their toughness enabled them to colonise overseas.

This may not sound like good news but intensive farming, urban sprawl and pollution is destroying nature. The wildlife in our gardens and countryside depends on plants, but climate change is making it harder for them to grow. Nettles’ resilience makes them a vital tool in the fight to halt this nature crisis.

Stinging nettles help wildlife survive, especially in urban and agricultural areas. In the UK, they are the caterpillar food plant for comma, painted lady, peacock, red admiral and small tortoiseshell butterflies. The