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!

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.