Nettlespire

The Nettlespire is a finicky little plant. Almost all of the plant is entirely useless.
It smells awful, has thorns up and down its stem, and will make your eyes water uncontrollably if you were to hold it too close to your face. Forget about it if someone decided to rub one's eyes after handling a Nettlespore without gloves. It would be an exercise is depriving oneself of their most relied-upon sense for the better part of a day, or at least until they submerged their face in water and vigorously washed it for minutes. If one was unfortunate enough to ingest this flora, well, let's just say it will be a bad time. If it is offensive to one's olfactory senses, then it is downright assaulting of one's digestive system.
The Nettlespire isn't even a specie to boast a beautiful flower, if someone was to even call it a flower. It is biologically a flower, but not visually one. It has a unique, rounded shape like some orchids, but it blends in with the rest of the plant and likely the rest of the vegetation it finds itself among. It's a mystery as to why insects even visit this plant, and its mates, to even perpetuate the specie.
The Nettlespire grows no more than two foot tall and severs easily from its roots, making it among the more fragile plants of the habitat it calls home, which is something of note. The Nettlespire tends to find itself in some of the most precarious of locations. If there was a barometer for adrenaline-seeking plants, the Nettlespire would be among the most ambitious. It tends to find itself on small islets in the middle of dangerous swamps or tar pits. It doesn't seem to have a requisite level of air quality, or direct sunlight, to survive, but more the will to put itself in protected places. But why, one might ask? The Nettlespire has the potential to be an old plant. Even being defined as a flower, it can live as old as the trees that surround it. So long as it has water to drink and food to eat, time is not an enemy of this enigmatic plant.
So why would one care about such a plant? It doesn't make for good house décor. Not only is it almost impossible to grow, it is hazardous to harvest. It offends the senses and brings no nutritional benefits, even to the most eccentric of herbalists, who likely have individually unique horror stories about the one time they tried to use it in a tea. So what is it?
There are many plants in nature that have varieties of uses depending on what part of the plant is used and how it is prepared. Some plants make for a delicious condiment if a certain part of it is prepared one way, and a weapon in biological warfare if another aspect is used in another way.
The Nettlespire is similar in that one very specific part of this plant can be used for a very specific reason.
This very specific reason relies on uniquely skilled herbalists.
Uniquely skilled herbalists are hard to find.
Once one has found a uniquely skilled herbalist, one must bid higher than everyone else lobbying for said uniquely skilled herbalist's time.
Bidding wars cause conflict. Conflict causes violence.