Hi, I'm Shana from Sage Country Herbs,
and I am here at Mount Pisgah Arboretum
with Mountain Rose Herbs,
and we're going to go and enjoy
some of our plant friends of the Pacific Northwest.
Come along.
Let's say hi to this friend hidden amongst the overgrowth.
It is so cool.
So this is stinging nettle.
I am touching it, which is pretty awesome.
So this is Urtica is its genus.
It's part of its own family, the Urticaceae family.
I think it's really cool to touch it,
because there are nettles that grow across the country,
and there are different species that grow
in different areas.
The native nettles where I live in Southern California,
they grow 12 feet tall,
and the spines on them primarily on the stem are so intense
they can cause pins and needles tingling
in your nerves where they sting for 48 to 72 hours.
Here I am holding the stem.
Down where I come from, I would never do this.
Ah, so this one is a different species.
But they all have some characteristics
that make it easy to identify.
Number one, you've got these really gorgeous leaves.
They have a long leaf stem called a petiole,
and a nice, sometimes heart-shaped or cordate blade.
Cordate means heart-shaped.
Notice how it comes out like a heart up here.
The margins or the edges of the leaf, these are really key,
because they have what look like teeth.
They're a serrated edge, and that is,
no matter what nettle you find,
a serrated edge is very common.
You can see even with the smaller leaves
and the larger leaves that they have a same general shape,
kind of like an elongated heart.
These leaves are also opposite.
So in the realm of field botany, we have
three main orientation of leaves.
You have opposite that grow opposite each other
off the stem.
This is a really good example.
Opposite where each other grows off the stem.
There are alternate, meaning they alternate each other
up the stem.
And then there are whorled leaves,
which means three or more leaves coming off
of the same point on the stem.
So this is a really good example of opposite.
You have opposite leaves here.
Opposite leaves. Opposite leaves.
They grow opposite each other.
Now the stem almost has a little bit of a squareness to it,
and that's actually very common with opposite leaves
that a stem might have a squareness to it.
Opposite leaves and a square stem
are common family characteristics of the mint family,
the Lamiaceae, but this is not the mint family.
And the way that they are very different
is that this plant
has these
very small flowers that actually don't fit
with the mint family at all.
These are from the Urticaceae family,
or the Urtica family, the nettle family.
They've got these cool
what are
little, tiny flowers that hang.
They dangle from leaf axles, and that is really cool.
And the flowers themselves are very small and starlike.
But the real key is how they dangle from those leaf axles,
and the plant tends to, well, this plant can range
from I've seen nettles plants range from being,
we've got garden nettles or what are called weedy nettles
that can be really invasive,
and those can be just two or three feet.
And then we have larger nettles that can be eight feet,
and then as I mentioned, some of the nettles
by me can grow up to 12 feet.
So really
it's getting to know the orientation
and what the plant looks like.
But also what's just as important, if not more important
is where does it grow?
Nettles like to grow generally by water,
not always, but often.
And it doesn't have to be right next to water or in water.
It can be in marshy areas.
It can be where water, when it rains, flows,
so it's going to dry up relatively quick.
But it grows in generally marshy.
This is a dried-up, marshy area.
Nettle does tend to like to be by water.
But of course the claim to fame of nettles is the name
stinging nettle.
These stingers, maybe it's just because
it's late in the season...
These are not bad at all.
More of just like an, "oh, oh, there's an awareness there,"
whereas not like the nettles from where I come from.
So these stingers are not like a physical, mechanical sting.
I should say more like, it's not like a thorn.
It doesn't just poke you.
The stingers of Urticas, of stinging nettle,
are actually like little hypodermic needles.
They are hollow tubes, and when they go into your skin
or really wherever they are penetrating,
they release a cocktail of chemicals.
And some of those chemicals are, well,
they are things that we recognize in human physiology,
which is pretty awesome.
There is a little bit of histamine in those.
Because of histamine,
the nettle sting will often get a little bit itchy
and a little bit raised, maybe get a little welty.
There's also some precursors
to some of our own endogenous hormones
like dopamine, serotonin.
These are some of our feel-good hormones.
Interestingly enough, people will use stinging nettles,
it's a specific type of therapy called urtication therapy
where you take something like an arthritic joint.
Maybe my elbow has arthritis,
and arthritis in the elbow tends to be kind of cold.
You don't get a lot of blood flow
and a lot of healing to that area.
So you take a stinging nettle,
and you'd whap it on that joint.
And that's stinging it over and over,
which is then helping to bring more fresh blood flow
to an area.
It's depositing some of those little bits of chemicals
that is actually stimulating healing response from the body.
The area warms up.
You get some little welts, but the area warms up,
and more blood equals more function.
You bring more blood flow.
You bring more healing compounds to an area.
So urtication therapy is actually a thing
where you're using nettles to actually flagellate yourself
and get more healing to an area,
which is a really cool thing.
I actually had this happen with a student.
I had a student who had had surgery on their foot.
And if this was their foot, the nerve to their pinky,
their pinky toe had been severed.
And so they could feel right here on their foot,
but they had no feeling right here,
because there was no nerve.
The nerve had been severed.
And so we were out on a plant walk,
and they were in like a three-month class with me.
And we talked about nettle, and they were like,
"Well, can nerves grow?"
And I said, "Yeah, actually nerves can grow."
And she was like, "Do you think
"if I hit this pinky toe with it
"that I could get feeling back?"
And I was like, "Well, I don't know,
"but I think it's worth a try.
"But it's not necessarily going to happen immediately.
"It would be something you'd want to do consecutively,
"like each day."
And so they did it, and
they said, "I'm not feeling anything."
And I was like, "Well, try stinging yourself
"in an area that you do feel."
And she did, and she was like, "Oh, I felt that."
And I was like, "Okay, so you know it's working.
"So now you can sting yourself in this way."
And she was like, "Oh, this is great.
"I've got a little creek right by my house,
"so I can just go down there like each day."
And I was like, "Perfect."
By the end of the class,
she actually came up to me and said,
"I don't believe I'm saying this,
"but I started feeling like some weird little,
"it's not full feeling,
"but it's like weird little like nerve impulses,
"like actually feeling a nerve."
It's not full feeling of everything,
but she could feel something happening
with her nervous system.
And how cool is that?
Because if there's one way to convince people
in a class that herbs work,
it's to get them to actually feel it.
And nettles is a great way to do that.
A lot of nettle's claim to fame is to actually use it,
usually in freeze-dried,
but I think you can use it in a wide variety of ways.
The more we are taking in nettles,
the more we are actually teaching
our own endogenous histamine to not overreact to allergies.
So, let's say in April you always sneeze.
Every year you sneeze in April, and you don't know why,
and there's too many things blooming
so you can't isolate it,
but you know you're allergic to some pollen in April.
If you start drinking nettle tea in February or March,
and you drink it on the regular so you're introducing it,
it's basically having, it is a liver-supportive tea.
It's also a diuretic, so it is kidney-supportive.
And your liver is what produces histamine,
and so the more you drink nettle tea,
you are introducing some of the histamine from the nettle,
and you're actually being supportive of your liver
so it's not overreacting to allergies.
And using nettle tea could be an adjunct
to a comprehensive program for your allergies.
Other things you could do, eating some local honey.
Maybe you're introducing the pollen through the GI tract,
and it helps educate your immune system
that you don't need to worry about that pollen up here.
It's not actually doing anything wrong.
Nettles are a wonderful adjunct
to a program to help teach your body
to not overreact to allergies.
And that's by far my favorite way to use nettles.
Besides the fact that, oh, it fell (laughs).
Besides the fact that the biggest claim to fame of nettles
outside of its stingers are the fact
that it's one of the most mineral-rich plants on the planet.
So drinking a tea,
because a lot of minerals are water-soluble.
So drinking tea of nettles is a wonderful way
to get mineral supplementation.
Minerals are insanely important,
not only for things like building bones
or the structure of your body
but also for providing electrical activity.
Minerals are generally electrically charged particles
that donate some of their electrical charge
to our nervous system so we can communicate,
because our nervous systems actually use electricity
to communicate information.
So minerals are incredibly important,
as well as all kinds of other things like healthy skin and
structural integrity of our blood vessels,
all kinds of good things that minerals do.
And nettles are a wonderful way of getting those minerals.
And just started doing this in the last year.
We had all of these weedy nettles growing in our garden.
And I love nettles,
but I'm also trying to grow other things.
So we're plucking the nettles out,
and I'm eating some of them as microgreens,
because they develop their stingers a little bit later.
So if you can get them really early, you can eat them.
But then actually my husband did some research,
and he found this wonderful recipe
for fermented plant juice.
This is the coolest thing.
You take the weeds, especially the nutrient-rich weeds,
which most of them are, out of your garden.
And then you turn around,
and you ferment them using a little bit of sugar and water.
And basically you take the weeds
that are like the bane of your existence
when you're a gardener,
and you turn them into plant food.
And then you use those same weeds
that were out-competing your garden plants
to feed nutrition into the soil,
because the food that you eat out of your garden is,
and really the food that you eat period
is only as nutritious as the soil that it grows in.
So use the weeds that are naturally growing in your garden
to turn them into plant food by fermenting them,
and then turn that around and feed your garden plants.
If there is a win, win, win relationship there,
I don't know what's better than taking the things
that are annoying you, turning them into food
for the things you're trying to grow.
I mean, how cool is that?
And that's from all of this wonderful nettles.
For me, the weedy nettles, they can be really invasive.
They can just completely pop up all over the place.
So this is actually my new favorite way.
I mean, I have a lot of different ways of using nettles.
Nettle pesto is fantastic,
and the grinding will take away those stingers.
But definitely right now, my favorite way to use nettles,
especially the invasive ones growing in my garden,
is to actually turn them into plant food.
Both for plant food for my plants, but also for me.
So they're actually a wonderful weedy edible.
You just need to learn how to process them appropriately
so that you're not going to get stingers in your tongue.
Because I've done that, and that sucks.
You don't want that.
So just learn how to do it properly,
and they are a nutritional powerhouse.
A good friend to have (laughs).
Thank you so much for joining us
for a plant walk at Mount Pisgah,
and I hope you come back and see more plant walks,
and maybe I'll see you out in the field.