Lamium pupureum | purple dead-nettle

How to grow purple dead-nettle, a gentle bee friendly wildflower

One of the hardest choices I faced when writing my first book Wild about Weeds was deciding whether to include white dead nettle or red dead nettle as one of the top 50 wild plants. The limit of 50 set by the cost of printing a set number of pages. In the end I opted for white dead nettle because it had received so little love from other gardening books and I had a lot to say about it. But in the back of my mind I felt bad for giving its purple relative only a little side mention. So today I want to rectify that.

What to say about this wonderful plant? First let’s address the name, why do people call it red when it is clearly purple-pink, even the scientific name got it right: ‘purpureum’ means purple. Really we should correct this and call it purple dead-nettle, which I have done in the title of this page.

Dead-nettles receive their name because they look a bit like stinging nettles but have no sting; the sting is ‘dead’. They aren’t related to stinging nettles at all, they sit in th…