Purple Dead Nettle, spring allergies, and the medicine hiding in plain sight on the farm floor
It is purple, and it is everywhere.
Walk any field at P.A. Bowen Farmstead right now and you will find it carpeting the soil between the pasture grasses — low, dense, spreading in overlapping rosettes of soft hairy leaves, their upper tiers flushed a deep reddish-purple that catches the early April light in a way that is, if you stop and look, genuinely beautiful. Most people don’t stop and look. It reads as a weed, which in agricultural terms it largely is, and the eye passes over it on the way to something more obviously important.
This is a mistake the Vitalist tradition would recognize as characteristic: the most available medicine is often the least examined. The plant underfoot is the one the season is actually offering.
Lamium purpureum — Purple Dead Nettle — is one of the first plants to come alive in the Maryland spring. And its name contains a paradox worth sitting with.
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