Herb
Punishing to touch and generous to work with — the weed that follows people about.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Nettles grow where people have been. They want nitrogen and phosphate, which means old farmyards, middens, ruins and anywhere a settlement stood, and archaeologists have used stands of nettle as a hint about where to dig. The plant is, in a literal sense, a record of human presence.
Everything about it is useful and everything about it stings. Nettle fibre was spun and woven long before flax became standard, and German uniforms in the First World War included nettle cloth when cotton ran short. Young tops were a spring green across northern Europe, the sting destroyed by cooking. The Hans Christian Andersen story of shirts woven from nettles by a sister in silence is drawing on a real and painful craft.
Craft uses nettle for protection, for breaking hexes, and for returning something to its sender — the sting doing the symbolic work. It is also a herb of endurance and of getting on with it, which anyone who has weeded a bed of them will recognise.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653)
Culpeper reasons it out loud: Mars is hot and dry, winter is cold and moist, and therefore nettle tops eaten in spring consume the phlegmatic superfluities winter left behind. The logic is immaculate and the premises are entirely made up.
Carried forward
Northern European textile practice
Nettle stems were retted and spun into cloth long before flax became standard, and the practice was revived under wartime shortage. The folk tale about shirts woven from nettles in silence is describing something people actually did, minus the silence.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.