Got a crop of Stinging Nettles in your garden? They are NOT weeds!
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