Before the back garden became overgrown with dead, wilted things, it used to play host to all sorts of curious plants. One of them was a type of stinging nettle–urtica. I did a paper on it in high school. Buried beneath paragraphs outlining its medical uses was a passage on urtication, sometimes used as a form of punishment, and how the fibers could be extracted, weaved with something like leather. I got top marks.
