Nettles

Overview

Nettles grow where people have been. They want the rich, trodden, dunged soil around houses, middens, and byres, and they stay long after the people have gone. In the Broken Marches a bed of nettles in empty country is the first sign of an old settlement under the grass, and salvagers dig there. Nettles sting, and they also feed and clothe the poor.

Appearance

The nettle stands knee- to chest-high in dense patches, its square stems and its leaves covered in fine, brittle, glassy hairs. The leaves are heart-shaped, coarsely toothed, dark green, and set in opposite pairs; from the leaf joints hang thin, drooping strings of tiny green flowers in summer. Touched, the hairs break and inject their sting: a burning, then white bumps on reddened skin that tingle for hours. A nettle bed smells green and slightly sour when trampled.

Habitat and Range

Nettles grow everywhere people farm and settle, and more where they have stopped: around ruined steadings and towers, old middens and cesspits, in ruin-courts and the corners of abandoned storeworks, and along stream banks where dung washes down. They are thickest in the Marches and around every village in the cradle-web, and they grow on the far side around fold stores, harbour middens, and Orc camping rings.

Behaviour and Temperament

They spread by creeping yellow roots and by seed, and a patch can stand on the same ground for a lifetime of the people who made it. Dig them out and they come back from any root left in the ground.

Life Cycle

A long-lived plant that dies back in winter and comes up again in early spring, among the first green things of the year. Seed falls in late summer.

Uses and Dangers

The young tops, picked in spring with a gloved hand, lose their sting in boiling water and make a green broth and a pottage that carries poor households through the hungry gap before the gardens bear. Dried, nettles are fodder for hens and a tea for the old. Their stems, retted and beaten like flax, give a coarse, strong fibre for cloth, cord, and nets, and in the Marches nettle cloth is cheaper than linen and lasts longer. They make a green dye, and their roots a yellow one. Some healers whip stiff joints with fresh nettles, which hurts more than the joint.

They sting, and nothing more. Children fall into them and live.

Lore and Belief

Salvagers of the Marches say "dig where the nettle stands", and are often right. Some households say a nettle bed by the door keeps the lightning off; others that it keeps off ill wishes. Goblins hold that nettles are the ghosts of the people who once lived on that ground, still guarding it, and they step through without complaint.

Ruin-delvers tell of a lord's hoard found under the thickest nettle bed in the Marches, and of the delver who dug it up and was found the next morning stung, robbed, and dead in it.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi