Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1330/en

The whole growth habit of the stinging nettle — its inclination to grow modestly wherever human hands have brought something into disorder: at sites where putrefaction reigns, where rubble heaps lie, on neglected pastures and where old machines rust away in the undergrowth, on soils with near-surface iron-bearing groundwater, and further, wherever transitional zones have been created in the landscape, along roadsides, waterway embankments, hedge-borders and woodland edges — all of this, together with the intense green of the leaves (itself an effect of nitrogen, but above all of iron, without which the magnesium-bearing chlorophyll could not form) and equally the strict order of its sturdy, upright gestalt, all of this points to the fact that the stinging nettle commands the iron process — an expression of heightened I-force. Wherever it grows, it creates, by virtue of its «großartigen Innenwirkung» ("magnificent inward working"), order in the middle between "above and below." It brings about a harmonious levelling of one-sided soil processes, forming in the process an extraordinarily stable, crumbling mull humus.