Wooly Mullein

With temps in the low Twenties even during the day, the puzzle is why any plant that isn't obviously a deep-woods-Winter-loving holly or pine tree would stick around.  Like this patch of young mullein rosettes.



Leaves a foot long, velvet-fuzzy and as juicy as lettuce.  Why bother keeping them green and healthy now, taking it on the chin day by day, month by month, from December to the return of sane weather in April?  Why not just pack it in, drop your leaves, and call in sick until Spring?
How can this be a fight that's worth fighting?


And indeed, here in a Northern garden, the mullein's stalwart and even, well, stupid persistence doesn't make sense.  Instead of dropping the leaves when frost comes, like something sensible and decisive like a maple, the mullein leaves are out there all Winter long, getting beaten up, beaten down, and beaten back until by early Spring only the tiniest ones at the very center are still green, still viable.

Remarkably, despite the carnage, the plant itself lives over the Winter just fine—mulleins are generally quite hardy.  This one is Verbascum thapsiforme, and it's fine down to Twenty Below.  But because it will, literally, live to see another day, it seems particularly pointless to keeping the increasingly-bedraggled and destroyed leaves day by day through the Winter.  Just drop these, and grow fresh ones when the livin' is easy.

One key to the puzzle is that, with days only into the 20's (and who can imagine the nights), the leaves aren't just persisting with dread and with increasing injury.  To the contrary, they look proud and even happy.  So far at least, Winter hasn't yet sullied them a bit.  They're completely able to handle deep freezes and even snow.

And that newest foliage?



It's the hardiest of all, lasting almost untouched right through to Spring.  And the second the weather is the least bit permitting—warmth per se isn't needed just reliably above freezing is all—the entire rosette mushrooms into action.  With that new foliage leading the charge, the leaves become gigantic, smothering any potential surrounding competitors before they've even germinated.

So:  This plant is completely hardy through a "real" Winter, and it's quite unfazed by mild ones, and would seemingly grow right through them if given the chance.  And while it tolerates the Summer heat as well as drought, it seems to truly thrive in cooler weather.

"Mild" Winter is the answer:  Verbascums are usually from climates where Winters are (by New England standards) just wet and raw, not deep-frozen.  Occasional frost, a few days of snow now and then?  No problem.  They've soon given way to cool weather and plenty of moisture.  And that's fine growing weather, especially considering the real yearly torture to come: Summer.  Drier and drier, hotter and hotter.  Thank goodnesss the verbascum's titanic flower spike is basically erected in the still-tolerable Spring.  In Summer all that has to happen is the flowering and the setting of the seeds.

Of course, home base for a verbascum would be anywhere at all around the Mediterranean.  And once they had this wet-Winter growing season / dry-Summer dormancy cycle perfected, the verbascums would inevitably spread farther and farther away from the comparative moderation right around the sea.  Mile by mile away, up in the mountains where it was colder because of the altitude, or farther and farther inland where it was cold because the warm Mediterranean water wasn't at hand, or just plain farther and farther North, where even the water was colder too.

In all cases, the verbascum was spreading where its preferred mild-and-wet Winter growing season got icier and icier and therefore dicier and dicier.  But on three crucial accounts, that wasn't a problem:  First, even if Winter is solid ice, Fall is still the wet-and-mild weather the verbascums make the best use of.  And so is Spring.

Second, in harder and harder climates, the longer and longer Winter didn't mean shorter Falls or Springs, it means a shorter Summer.  Which is the verbascum's heading-into-dormancy season anyway.

And third, even if just by fluke, the verbascum was hardy enough to survive the deep-freeze Winters.  (Thapsiforme, as I say, will take down to Minus Twenty.  That's Montreal folks.)  So that a real Winter would interrupt its preferred mild-Winter growing season?  Tedious but not serious.

And so not-serious that the verbascum has never needed to do anything different to cope with a Winter that's tediously harsh, but ultimately not serious.  Why make a big change in lifestyle—by dropping your leaves soon into hard frost—if you don't have to?

And indeed, the verbascum doesn't have to at all.  In it's own plant-brain way, it just doesn't care, doesn't need to care.  And it would be a fool if it is.  Right now, whatever happens to the Fall leaves happens; Spring will be here soon enough, and by staying at least moderately alert and at the ready, the verbascum beats any of the neighbors when the weather breaks and even the wusses like, oh, hostas, would think about poking a nose above ground.  If you're near a verbascum and you think like a hosta, you're screwed even though it's only April.

So my verbascum patch, which at first seemed like Winter had caught it with its pants down?  Don't worry at all.  Pants down or not, the verbascums will do just fine.  They aren't disadvantaged by their lack of interest in going dormant for the Winter.   (Or by having their pants down either.)  Their dis-ability to drop their leaves isn't a disability at all.  They're like Arnold:  They're so tough they don't need to be concerned about Winter.  Dropping leaves just because it's a little cold out?  That's for wusses.  For perennials that are wusses, for perennials that are, perennially, wusses.  For perennials that are—what did Arnold call them?—girlie men.

Verbascums:  Arnold all the way.