fourteen notes on nettles

with photographs

“Urtica Dioica. - It is common everywhere. Every one knows it.”

1. Why aren't they everywhere, I wonder aloud, looking at a sprawling patch of nettles in a little wooded garden in Suffolk; they live on disturbed land, comes the answer, they thrive where we have been and gone. In The Mushroom at the End of the World Anna Tsing describes the trade in matsutake mushrooms, which we do not know enough about to intentionally cultivate but which we know grow well in the wastelands left behind by commercial logging operations, the peculiar economics of foraging, transferring goods from the "wild" – often publicly owned conservation areas – into private hands. The foragers who begin this process consist of a kind of feral in-between class, army veterans, career hippies, people without paperwork; America has the space, physically, for this kind of population.

2. Every so often in this country there is a media scare, seemingly orchestrated by the commercial importers of foraged goods from the continent, about the over-exploitation of foraging sites and the damage done by waves of foragers to sensitive populations, articles extrapolating wildly to suggest hundreds of people descending on woodland and hedgerow; when I worked in London there was one forager who supplied every chef I knew. The farmers' market in Canterbury is kept in wild goods by one of their restaurant's dishwashers, who lives in the woods when it is warm enough and forages mushrooms and wild greens of all kinds in season, while elsewhere foraging for food might be an afterthought for those in search of psychedelic mushrooms, or done incidentally on a walk in the woods, along the shore, and only afterwards brought to a restaurant kitchen in the hope of selling some. I don't think I have ever been offered nettles for sale, or seen them next to wild garlic and morels at the market.