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Nettle pollen

Nettle (Urtica dioica) is airborne here from june to september, peaking July. Allergenic potency: low. No established food cross-reaction.

This is reference information, not a diagnosis and not a treatment plan. A pollen calendar cannot tell you what you are allergic to, and no page can clear a food as safe for you — only the label on the packet in your hand and the clinician who knows your history can do that. Anything beyond mild, short-lived symptoms in the mouth or nose — swelling that affects breathing or swallowing, hives away from the mouth, wheeze, vomiting or faintness — is an emergency question, not a reading question.

● peak weeks · ○ usually airborne. Typical mainland window from the national aerobiology monitoring programmes of the region · checked 2026-09-06

Where it grows here

Stinging nettle grows on every nutrient-rich, disturbed patch of ground in the region — farmyards, ditches, woodland edges, abandoned gardens — and it flowers for months, releasing large amounts of pollen in visible puffs when a stem is knocked.

When it is in the air

Nettle is airborne from June to September and often reaches some of the highest grain counts of the whole summer on regional monitoring traps. That makes it prominent on any calendar built from counts, and it is why the nettle line frequently looks alarming next to grass.

What it feels like

Mild, if any. Nettle is more often a bystander on a test result than a cause of a bad summer.

What it cross-reacts with

High counts and low potency are not the same thing. Nettle is a weak allergen and rarely causes significant symptoms on its own in this region. Its family contains a genuinely severe allergen — pellitory, Parietaria — but that is a Mediterranean plant and is not part of the northern flora. Nettle rash from touching the plant is a mechanical and chemical sting, not an allergy, and has nothing to do with the pollen.

Related pollens: other members of the nettle family, including the Mediterranean pellitory.

Foods: no established cross-reaction. That is a useful negative — a food reaction in someone sensitised to nettle is not explained by the pollen and deserves its own assessment.

Named allergen molecules: No major allergen established in routine diagnostics. These are the official WHO/IUIS names, and they are what a component-resolved blood test reports.

What actually helps

Nettle is worth knowing about mainly so that you do not chase it. If July is bad, grass is the first candidate; if late August is bad, mugwort and mould are the candidates. Nettle sits underneath both without adding much.

What gets misread

Because monitoring traps report a lot of it, nettle is sometimes presented as a major summer allergen in this region. Count is a measure of how much is in the air, not of how much trouble it causes.

Sources: Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, Annex II · Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 828/2014 (gluten claims) · WHO/IUIS Allergen Nomenclature · season windows from the national aerobiology monitoring programmes of Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway · cross-reaction patterns paraphrased from the allergy literature and EAACI material · checked 2026-09-06

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