Mulleins are equal-opportunity flowers. They'd take on a rocky roadside as easily as a sand dune, a meadow, or a proper garden bed. And no wonder: Huge heavy (and sometimes fantastically silvery) felted leaves in a basal clump that smothers anything nearby. And also act just like mulch, keeping the surrounding soil cooler at the same time they conserve water by cutting down surface evaporation.

The thick felt helps the leaves themselves reduce evaporation too, while, handily, also helping keep them unpalatable for animals.
And the central bamboo-cane-thick stem thrusts head-high-in-the-sky a titanic candelabra of flowers, ensuring that pollinators—deliriously dedicated bees chiefly—can see the plant from anywhere. And also locate sister plants near and far to complete the pollination.


(Who-Knew? Moment: The bees aren't intentionally pollinating anything. Unalloyed altruism isn't part of any animal's DNA. Instead, the bees are focussed on foraging, getting pollen for the hive. When they find a good source—in this case, one of those verbascum blossoms—they make the cost-effective choice to move right over to the next verbascum blossom, and the next and the next, whether on this plant or that one a half-mile away. In other words, they exhaust one pollen source before going to the trouble of sussing out anew one. That thoroughness is why pollination takes place at all: When the bee's loaded up with pollen, she's also dusted over with the excess that, in the frenzy, didn't make it into her pollen sacks. That excess is what gets brushed off onto—i.e., that pollinates— the next flower of the same exact variety, not some random nearby flower of who-knows-what kind, where the pollen couldn't pollinate at all.  The bee doesn't have a clue and couldn't care less even so: it's all about getting more and more of that sure thing, that particular kind of pollen, first.)



I've long enjoyed the height, enthusiasm, and color of Verbascum thapsiforme.
Up to nine feet tall, in bloom for months, and with large flowers too.



And so, like a bee, when it comes to me and verbascums, More Is More too. More mulleins, in kind and in quantity both.



Here's an unusual tiny-flowered, but full-sized variety at Chanticleer. Wow what a staggeringly-good place.
The same impressive and smothering clump of large leaves...

...leading up to the same massive candelabra of untold hundreds of yellow flowers that perform, at least as an entire troop, for three months and more.

But the flowers are teensy, a quarter the size of mine.
See how much bigger (comparatively) the flowers of V. thapsiforme are?
Smaller isn't lesser. Smaller is fabulous! In the garden as in life, variety itself is valuable, regardless of the direction.



If the original is shorter, then taller is of interest (or shorter still). If the flowers are deep yellow, then please bring on pale yellow. If the leaves are green, then let's have them in purple or yellow or striped with white. If they are smooth, make them felted. If they are oval, turn them into ferny fingers. And if the flowers are large (well, -ish), then let's oooh and aaah over them when they are tiny instead.



And ooof and aaah I did.



Oo yes: and if the plant is available at Home Depot (or just growing there right by the road, where you can dig up a young rosette in early Spring for free), make the new variety scarce and expensive: I'll only want it more.



This mullein trumps all those aces, though: Even Chanticleer doesn't know the identity or where they got it. Either I'll need to make good friends so they'll let me harvest some seeds (not impossible) or I'll Google away in hopes of identifying the species as well as the source.
It sure looks like Verbascum olympicum...
...whose flowers are noticeably smaller than my thapsiforme's. (Thank you Hidden Hollow Farm for the picture.) But Chanticleer would have known this identify right off the bat. Mysterious indeed.

All tactics, please, to identify and the source Chanticleer's Mystery Mullein. Gotta have it!

The usual pink-flowered foxgloves cause my fingers to drum on the desk. Yes, the spikes of flowers have the English it-will-never-get-truly-hot early Summer lushness. (But yes, they often need a bit of staking.) And yes, I like how they very considerately die after flowering, getting out of the way for the hot-weather show of the heat-lovers that make the July, August, and September garden such a thrill. Just let one or two die in peace, to ripen seed, and you'll have pink foxgloves forever.
But, they are pink. And that limits them to the few places (I hope) where you don't also have a lot of fun yellow and chartreuse foliage. Why not a foxglove that loves to pal around with yellow? Then you could have foxgloves anywhere, no matter what other colors were happening. Here's the answer: Digitalis 'Flashing Spires'. Narrow all-green leaves and narrow spikes of pale-yellow flowers are both self-supporting. (Take that, pink foxgloves.) And the color goes as well with pink as it does with red or yellow or orange. (Take that, pink foxgloves.)
Yes indeedy, Flashing Spires self-seeds with gusto. But the plants are very easy to yank, or (if by some miracle you don't have Flashing Spires everywhere) transplant.
Like all foxgloves, deer avoid them completely. And Flashing Spires comes absolutely true from seed, so your spires will always be the same soft-yellow. (Take that, pink foxgloves, whose offspring vary from white to pink to rose.)
I've had Flashing Spires for year (and years), and in forty years or so, look forward to passing it on to my inheritors.

My garden never met a mullein that didn't love it. Heavy soil, high water table, plenty of sun, smaller things to smother, larger things to poke up through, plenty of bees to service the flowers. Yep, it's verbascum heaven here.
Here's Verbascum thapsiforme, doing everything it does best.
The huge leaves of the fast-growing rosette arch out over everything in reach, shading them and, then, as older leaves tire and flop to the ground, smothering them directly. This plant is self-mulching! (Click the picture to see how big the plant really is.) I'll yank off the leaves from this rosette that would otherwise flatten the dwarf hostas. All verbascums I'm interested it are true biennials, with foliage the first year, a titantic skyward-thrusting bloom structure the second, jillions of seeds that germinate readily, and a quick death for the mother plant when the blooming is done. (Verbascums I'm NOT interested in? There are demure knee-high "pretty" ones that are easy to raise for flower shows. Too lady-like I'm afraid.) Verbascums pop up where they will; cracks between stones are just as appealing as open spots in beds. Excess youngsters are easy to pull; I suppose you could transplant them too when they are really young, or it's really early in Spring. But they are tap-rooted, so you'd need to move quickly.
Some verbascums—verbasca?—have rosettes that are in themselves a show, with furry as well as colorful leaves; we'll see one in a later post. But the point, literally, of verbascums is more in the architectural flower-spikes, which for me, for Verbascum thapsiforme, can get eight feet tall.
Here's one au naturelle; thank you Wikipedia. Blooming can start later in June, and doesn't finish until (can it be? I'll document this season!) Labor Day and beyond.

There is never a day hot enough, a week dry enough, for the performance to flag. And thanks to the fuzzy leaves, no one—insect, bird, deer, rabbit—ever takes so much as one bite.
This is, in short and in tall, the perfect plant for all sunny Summer gardens.

Shooting today for GardenShorts.com at Wave Hill. One of the continent's most thrilling hunks of property, not least because the into-the-vista setting feels like Tuscany but is in the Bronx. Under cultivation, one way or another, for a couple of centuries, but only in the last fifty years have its gardens reached their current dizzying heights of sophistication, density, and extent. Sigh.
Here's a shot along one of the paths in the so-called "wild" garden...
...which doesn't mean wild in the sense of anything goes, the loucher the better. Nor wild in the sense of untouched let alone untamed. It's the layout that's wild, scrambling around a rocky slope on narrow winding gravel paths. Great horticulture crowds the pathways, and as everything soars higher and higher in Summer it becomes a full-body experience. In Spring it's great to have perennial plants that get high fast, when everyone else can be just building up a head of steam. In particular, these tall billowing heads of small yellow flowers. Which I couldn't identify off the bat—a thrill right there: Something new, something else that must be grown myself.
And in this picture the GottaGet is Isatis tinctoria.

Despite the brilliant yellow of the flowers,
isatis is one of two naturally-occurring sources for the deep-blue dye indigo.  (Tropical indigo, Indigofera tinctoria, has flowers that are a mild pink, but nonetheless the plant is loaded with the very same indigo dye, and in much higher concentrations too. In both plants, the dye is extracted from the leaves.) The large and early and many-many-small-flowers bloom heads are a tip-off, or rather a warning, that isatis is a biennial.
It's mission above all is to produce a zillion seeds early in the season, then die and let the seeds have at it.
Isatis is a noxious weed in several Western states, and while it's in the wild all over the East, apparently it's not a thug. So yes, I'll give it a try. If the self-seeding isn't a nightmare, the height and happy yellow of the flowers would be a delight. We'll see....