ouch mom!

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I feel badly about this.

On a walk down the street with my mother, I was admiring the stinging nettles in bloom along the roadside, while she was picking of cast-off aluminum cans to donate to the local Lion’s Club recycling bin. All of a sudden, she jumped back, remarking that she had just been stung by a bee.

“No Mom. You were stung by a plant; I should have warned you.”

“A stinging plant. I never heard of such a thing.”

The woman who brought me into the world had just been injected with several plant defensive chemicals including acetylcholine, histamine, serotonin, possibly formic acid and perhaps even some Drano. Ouch, Mom! Enough to give her a nasty but generally not long lasting painful burning sting.

Stinging nettles are not native to our part of the world. I guess they slipped over here on a boat. They're like "barbary" pirates with stems covered with tiny sharp barbs loaded with their toxic chemical soup. Oddly, in Britain I hear that a beer is made from the plants. I wonder: Does it sting or just slightly numb?

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