Spotted dead-nettle
Lamium maculatum
Family · Lamiaceae · Harmless
The plant that looks like a nettle and does not sting, fooling everyone at least once. It is told apart in a second by its large tubular flowers, which true nettle never has.
Roadsides and waste ground · Oak woods · Walls and rocks · Town and roadside
Also known asspotted henbit
How to tell it
Opposite heart-shaped leaves with a toothed margin and often a pale stripe along the midrib. A four-angled stem. Purplish pink hooded flowers in groups at the leaf axils. No stinging hairs.
What it is confused with
Stinging nettle
Urtica dioica
The flower settles it: dead-nettle has large showy tubular flowers, nettle has drooping green insignificant clusters. And only one of them stings.
What it is for
Young leaves eaten cooked, like nettle but without the bother, and the flowers are sucked for nectar. It is among the first plants to offer nectar at the end of winter.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
No approved contributions for this entry yet.
Nothing appears here without a person reading it first. Contributions do not replace the entry or its warnings: until a botanist confirms, what is written above stands.