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Slender stinging nettle plants are dioecious (unisexual) with male (staminate) and female (pistillate) flowers on separate plants. Flowers occur in knobby clusters (panicles) that arise from the leaf axils. Neither pistillate nor staminate flowers have any petals. Staminate flowers have four light green, identical sepals cupping four short stamens. Pistillate flowers also have four sepals but two sepals are narrowly lance-shaped, about a millimeter long, and free, alternating with two sepals that are 1.4-1.8 mm long and cupped around the ovary; styles are absent but the single stigma is long and feathery. The fruit is a flattened, oval to egg-shaped, seed less than 1/16" long. Stinging nettles (aka, tall nettle, slender stinging nettle) have a complicated biogeographic history. According to USDA Plants (https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/) and ITIS.gov, the subspecies "Urtica dioica gracilis" is native, while the subspecies "Urtica dioica dioica" is an exotic that is native to Europe and Asia. Thus, you may see "stinging nettle" listed as either "native" or "exotic." Both subspecies are perennials, and both occur in Illinois, although "gracilis" is most common; most features are the same for both subspecies. Wikipedia says these subspecies are actually separate species, an opinion based on a 2014 paper in Phytotaxa (162: 61-83) that analyzed molecular characters; Kew Garden's Plants of the World Online (https://powo.science.kew.org/) and iNaturalist also accept Urtica gracilis as a valid species. I've chosen to use "Urtica gracilis" here if only to avoid further proliferation of long scientific names in this presentation.

Urtica

Urtica gracilis

slender stinging nettle [Blooms: Jul-Aug]