te-places by roadsides or near cottages; and it has laid itself out
for the circumstances in which it lives. Its near relative, the hop, is
a twisting climber; its southern cousins, the fig and the mulberry, are
tall and spreading trees. But the nettle has made itself a niche in
nature along the bare patches which diversify human cultivation; and it
has adapted its stem and leaves to the station in life where it has
pleased Providence to place it. Plants like the dock, the burdock, and
the rhubarb, which lift their leaves straight above the ground, from
large subterranean reservoirs of material, have usually big, broad,
undivided leaves, that overshadow all beneath them, and push boldly out
on every side to drink in the air and the sunlight. On the other hand,
regular hedgerow plants, like cleavers, chervil, herb Robert, milfoil,
and most ferns, which grow in the tangled shady undermath of the bank
and thickets, have usually slender, bladelike, much-divided leaves, all
split up into little long narrow pushing segments, because they cannot
get sunlight and air enough to build up a single large respectable
rounded leaf.

The nettle is just halfway between these two extremes. It does not grow
out broad and solitary like the burdock, nor does it creep under the
hedges like the little much-divided wayside weeds; but it springs up
erect in tall, thick, luxuriant clumps, growing close together, each
stem fringed with a considerable number of moderate-sized, heart-shaped,
toothed and pointed leaves. Such leaves have just room enough to expand
and to extract from the air all the carbon they need for their growth,
without encroaching upon one another's food supply (for it must always
be borne in mind that leaves grow out of the air, not, as most people
fancy, out of the ground), and so without the consequent necessity for
dividing up into little separate narrow segments. Accordingly, this type
of leaf is very common among all those plants which spring up beside the
hedgerows in the same erect shrubby manner as the nettles.

Then, again, there is the flower of the nettle, which in most plants is
so much the most conspicuous part of all. Yet in this particular plant
it is so unobtrusive that most people never notice its existence in any
way. That is because the nettle is wind-fertilized, and so does not
need bright and attractive petals. Here are the flowering branches, a
lot of little forked antler-like spikes, sticking out at rig