The White Dead Nettle is fairly common everywhere except in the North of
Scotland. You find it in waste places, by the roadside, and on ditch
banks, and it blooms from spring to autumn.
This is a much more attractive plant than the Stinging Nettle we have
all learned to avoid.
The flowers grow in beautiful whorls or circles round the stem. In this
plant the flowers are snowy white, tinged with green, but in other Dead
Nettles you find them rose pink or deep purple.
There are often as many as eighteen flowers on one whorl. The flower
petals are joined together into a tube which stands in a shallow
calyx-cup, edged with five very long, sharp teeth. The mouth of the
white flower-tube is cut very irregularly. The upper part bends over
like a hood, and underneath this hood are hidden the four long stamens.
The lower part of the flower-tube hangs down like a tongue, and it is
fringed and rounded at the end. Amongst the stamens you see the slender
forked point which rises from the seed-vessel.
The leaves of the White Dead Nettle are very similar in shape to those
of the Stinging Nettle; but they are a paler shade of green. They grow
in pairs close to the stem, with a good space in between each pair, and
the ring of stalkless flowers clusters round the stem beside them.