> >Today I have two yards of nettle cloth hanging in my closet -- not the
> >European nettle of the tale, but a giant nettle called ramie, which
> >comes
> >from some tropical island. I also have a ramie attache case, which
> >looks
> >rather like cordura.
>
> I wonder how giant is the giant nettle... Some of the patches my
> cousins pushed me into grew well above my 6-7-8yr old head. And, seeing
> them as an adult, I'd judge them to be about 3' on average, with some
> plants reaching more than 4 feet in height. That's about as tall as the
> flax plants.
Yes, nettles can definitely get pretty big. I wonder whether the big ones and
the small ones are different strains or it just depends on the soil or
something.
> Sometimes I wonder what made people think that the stinging nettle
> could be turned to thread... Was it when they harvested - for eating -
> plants that were too old and had grown grown "stringy"?
Or when they tried to get rid of the nettles in their gardens and noticed that
the stems are hard to rip...
I've also heard getting stung by nettles is actually healthy (may be completely
false), so people might have used them for that too. Although it's a very bad
idea now, especially when they grow next to roads and such - they accumulate all
sorts of nasty stuff.
Weronika
--
Weronika Patena
Caltech, Pasadena, CA, USA
http://vole.stanford.edu/weronika
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