Eyes smarting, throat tickling, nostrils dog-wet, I pick my way along a thready footpath up the combe, only half-prepared for the next irritation. Nettles, I am watching you. But not well enough it seems, for a sneaky one hidden under the skirts of encroaching grasses and umbellifers grazes the back of my bare calf. It induces that tingling somewhere between pain and pleasure – one that quickly develops into a needling throb.
It is hard to love a nettle. This much-loathed plant may be one of the first that many children learn to identify, for their own protection. It has a secondhand look, with wrinkly, crinkly jagged hearts for leaves. It has no sheen; it does not shine. Near-invisible fine hairs on the upper surfaces give the dulled green a dusty, soiled appearance.
Glass spines hang like malign stalactites from the undersides and poke their points out from the stems. Such small spikes, yet so much discomfort. Other than a bramble, no plant says no so emphatically, forming high, hairy phalanxes on these slopes, midsummer’s biggest block to off‑path wanderers.
A barrier to some; an opening for others. Close inspection picks out aphids aplenty, feeding, crawling, being. And the sap-suckers are being sucked, chomped and chewed by a red soldier beetle, alighting on the apex of one plant and finding meals on the downpipe. Spiders have hung out speculative chains between leaves and stems. A blackfly leg dangles halfway along one thread.
Most prominent of all are the little dark dots of insects swarming all over the purple-tinged flowers. Nettle flowers may be underwhelming, looking like over-tied knots of thin string, but they are irresistible to the aptly named nettle pollen beetles, locked into an orgy of eating and mating.
Tonight I will pay for breathing in during all this observation. The weather report might report a high grass pollen count for hay fever sufferers, but the air knows better. Those microscopic grains shooting the breeze include not just grasses, but also the near weightless dust of any wind-pollinated flower. And copious amounts are produced by the stinging nettle. Atishoo!