A Prickly Pair of Pants: Nettles and their Surprising Fiber Uses

Foraging for food is a very rewarding practice in and of itself, and greens are often on the menu almost all year round. This spring a dear friend and I gathered an impressive amount of one of the most useful herbs that grows in our region: Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica). Stinging nettle is a pretty wonderful plant, and while I prefer to eat Wood nettle (Laportea canadensis), stinging nettle is also a nutritious wild edible, medicinal, and get this, fiber plant.

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Yes, you can wear nettles. I remembered a few years ago my mentor and friend Natalie Bogwalker was walking me around a garden and pointed a nettle patch out to me. She said you could make fiber from the retted stalks in the fall. I love making cordage, but I had never tried it at that point in my life, and sadly the thought left my mind until recently. I was reading about neolithic cloth making and an article about nettle cloth discovered in a Danish burial came up. Nettles! The memory came flooding back to me and now I can't get it out of my mind.

Both hemp and nettle have been used to make fabric since prehistoric times. It is even speculated that nettle may have been the first fiber plant made into cloth. This makes sense, since it is actually related to flax. They were even cultivated in Northern Europe to make coarse sail cloth, fishnets and clothing. Flax eventually over took nettles in the clothing race, but up until the 19th century a you could find nettle based "scotchcloth", a crude, household cloth in Scotland. 

 Nettle even produces a "finer and silkier" fabric than flax. The plant not only made clothing, but it also dyes it. You can make a few different shades of green/yellow with a decoction of the plant. It was used all over Europe. It was Poland from the 12th century until the 17th century when it's use was replaced by silk.  It also had folk magical uses there as well: "Slavic people have attributed magical properties to [nettle] since ancient times (1)," using it to defend against demons, disperse storms and protect against lightning. 

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Nettle even produces a "finer and silkier" fabric than flax. The plant not only made clothing, but it also dyes it. You can make a few different shades of green/yellow with a decoction of the plant. It was used all over Europe. It was Poland from the 12th century until the 17th century when it's use was replaced by silk.  It also had folk magical uses there as well: "Slavic people have attributed magical properties to [nettle] since ancient times (1)," using it to defend against demons, disperse storms and protect against lightning. 

In Appalachia, some of the first white settlers in Kentucky, 

 "... in the fall of 1775 lessened their dependence on deerskin by applying what the wilderness had taught them on other frontiers. In the spring of 1776, after the home weavers had built looms, and snow and rain had rotted fallen nettles, settlers gathered and broke the stalks, hackling and spinning the wild fiber as they would hemp, trading meat and hides for the weavers' skill with the shuttle. Weavers mixed thread spun from nettle fiber with that of buffalo wool to make a substitute for linsey-woolsey. The combination of a nettle warp and buffalo wool filling was "very strong" according to Olive Boone" -Mitchell G. Farish "Homespun and Buckskin"

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Nettles were also used as cordage for fish nets and ropes and for weaving cloth by many the North American Native peoples, including the Cherokee.

We see nettle cloth in Grimm's fairytale "The Wild Swans", featuring magical nettle-made shirts created in silence. (Please do read the story). According to Harold A. Roth who has an incredible website over at Alchemy Works, 

"The use of "unspoken" nettles for curative purposes occurred in Scotland as well as other northern countries. In Ireland, nettles marked the places where the Elves lived and could protect a person from sorcery. If cows were fed wilted nettles, witches and trolls could not hex them to stop producing milk, so this is quite a protective herb, despite its association with death and burial. Indeed, according to contemporary belief, nettle carried on the person protects from lightning - and draws money. On the other hand, the Iroquois said that nettles mixed with the dried blood of a snake was witchcraft medicine."

Nettle really is as magical as it is useful. As I mentioned a few months back in our discussion of Mugwort, Nettle is also one of the herbs featured in the Nine Herbs Charm. It was called,

" stiðe (meaning 'rough, harsh, stiff') is also obscure as a plant-name, but appears from the closing instructions (to the charm) to be nettle (urtica dioica, urtica urens). The name 'nettle' derives from a root meaning of 'spin, sew', and nettles were once grown for their tough fibres which could be used like flax. Nettles can be used as animal-fodder and even in making beer, tea, soup and porridge. Its sap can be used as rennet (to curdle milk in cheese-making)." 
- Benjamin Slade

Bronze Age Nettle Cloth

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In this charm nettle, "attacks against poison, it drives out the hostile one, it casts out poison. This is the herb that fought against the serpent, it has power against poison,  it has power against infection, it has power against the loathsome foe roving through the land." I have read that the "loathsome foe" may be plague or other epidemic diseases that move, killing, through a population.

I'll save more information about the medicinal and nutritional properties of nettle for another day, but I know I am going back to that nettle patch this week and seeing if the stalks are great to yield their legendary bast fiber and see what kind of magical garment can be made from it. And here I will leave you with a tidbit of wisdom from Scotland:

“If they would eat nettles in March, and drink Mugwort in May, 
So many fine maidens would not go to the clay.” – Funeral Song of a Scottish Mermaid.

Sources:

(1) Jadwiga Zajaczkowa. Hemp and Nettle: Two Food/Fiber/Medicinal Plants used in Eastern Europe. Slovo. http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/SCA/hempnettle.html

Buchanan, Rita. A Weaver's Garden: Growing Plants for Natural Dyes and Fibers. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999.

Barber, E. J. W. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.

Hatfield, Gabrielle. Encyclopedia of Folk Medicine: Old World and New World Traditions. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.

Power, Susan C. Art of the Cherokee: Prehistory to the Present. Athens, GA: U of Georgia, 2007.

A great article about nettle cloth today!:

http://www.theecologist.org/green_green_living/clothing/304924/second_skin_why_wearing_nettles_is_the_next_big_thing.html 

http://www.alchemy-works.com/

http://www.wildfibres.co.uk/html/nettle_hemp.html

https://wytchofthenorth.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/herbs-for-hedgewitches-stinging-nettle-urtica-dioica/

http://www.bcliving.ca/garden/stinging-nettle-companion-plant-and-medicinal-herb