126 A GOOD WORD FOR THE NETTLE 



article of food may be noticed first. The young 

 tender shoots, taken in April or May, are occasionally 

 used as a table vegetable by those who have acquired 100 

 a taste for them, or imagined a benefit from them ; 

 but they are more frequently made use of as greens 

 by the poor, who have little choice, and by the well- 

 to-do peasantry in times of comparative famine. 

 Writing in April 1740 at Melville Castle, Lord 

 Leven makes the following statement : * Here we have 

 no grass at all ; if we have no change of weather 

 soon, the poo rpeople must starve. The poor creatures 

 in the neighbourhood come here begging for leave to 

 pull nettles about the dykes for themselves, and no 

 heather and moss for their beasts. We have daily 

 shoals, numbering sometimes twenty, with death on 

 their faces/ In some parts of Northern Europe, such 

 as Sweden and Norway, the nettle is even cultivated 

 as a good feeding stuff for pigs and other farm 

 animals. Poultry, as already mentioned, and espe- 

 cially turkeys, thrive upon it. A kind of beer, known 

 as nettle-tea, can be made from it, and is described as 

 medicinal and enlivening. Gipsies find a cheap means 

 of blistering in whipping themselves with a bunch of 120 

 nettles ; and they also eat the nettle after boiling it 

 to cure or prevent scurvy. There is even a nettle 

 potato, the tubers of which are eaten in India. But 

 the nettle is of utility also in the textile industry, 

 both for the manufacture and for the dyeing of cloth 

 and cordage. Nettle fibre was used for spinning and 

 weaving by the ancient Egyptians : it is still in use 

 for these purposes in various countries of Asia from 

 Assam to Siberia. The finest lace-work and the 

 coarsest cables can be made from the fibre of one or 130 



