Week 18: Great Mullein, Ashia Ajani, Hildegard von Bingen

Fig. 1. “Common mullein (Verbascum thapsus) with an associated moth and its anatomical segments.” Etching with watercolor. London: J. Curtis, 1831. From the Wellcome Collection.

This one’s a day late; I had to catch up on my day job and be an insomniac for a couple nights. Do you have any suggested species or sources for me to include in future dispatches? Leave a comment on Substack or send me an email.

Headnote#

The wooly, silver-green leaves were hard to miss in my community garden plot last spring. It’s the sort of plant you’ve seen before but never noticed (cf. “plant blindness”). I decided to let it continue growing, wildly and/or weedily, alongside the plants I had intentionally planted. Eventually, I learned that it was a mullein, likely “common” or “great” mullein, known for centuries as a respiratory support, fish poison, shoe insole, and candle. Plants are full of surprises. But since their introduction to North America up to 400 years ago, mulleins also have been a nuisance for farmers and often treated as an invasive weed. Plants are double-edged swords. Soft shelter or overpowering intruder, symbol of resilience and rage, a cure but also a poison, mullein survives our weeding and may, in the long run, survive us. Its seeds can lie dormant in soil for more than 100 years, until disturbed into the light.

Great mullein (Verbascum thapsus) is one of several hundred flowering species in the Verbascum genus, which itself is in the figwort (Scrophulariaceae) family. This scientific name potentially derives from barbascum (Latin for “bearded”) and Thapsos, the ancient Tunisian city. But the plant’s plethora of enticing nicknames and vernacular titles includes flannel leaf, velvet dock, lady’s candle, hag’s taper, Jupiter’s staff, hare’s beard, donkey’s ear, beggar’s blanket, and—much to my eight-year-old’s delight—cowboy toilet paper. Clearly, its stellate trichomes (star-shaped leaf hairs) and tower-like stem have not gone unnoticed. The biennial plant produces flat rosettes in its first year, followed in year two by a tall spike that flowers irregularly, with each blossom along the spike opening for one day. The spikes remain upright through winter, providing seed and perch or shelter for birds. It is a ruderal species that colonizes fire-scarred or logged landscapes, roadsides and construction sites, and so on. I hope it doesn’t completely overrun my garden.

Fig. 2. “Common Mullein.” from The Book of Wild Flowers: An Introduction to the Ways of Plant Life (Washington, DC: The National Geographic Society, 1924 [1915]), p. 111.

Readings#

1. One of my favorite facts about mullein is that it can produce hundreds of seeds—and these seeds can lay dormant for decades. I think mullein is clever, and it knows that rage is a conduit. Rage is almost like fire: fire is a reaction. It has to have fuel; it has to have combustion. Fire needs other components to exist. Mullein is like that. The plant produces all of these seeds, but those seeds know, Oh, I’m not in safe ground. Or, _I’m not in a good area where I can germinate and grow. I’m going to wait and bide my time._Going back to the idea of the Angry Black Woman trope, I grew up going to a predominantly white school. When I did anything there, I was received as angry or full of attitude or sassy. I was constantly trying to prove otherwise—and that became so exhausting. I am okay now. I’m at a place where I’m OK with saying, Hell yeah, I’m angry. Have you seen what’s going on? Why are you not _angry?_Everybody has their own emotions and their own way of processing them. For me, anger is the first emotion that emerges, and then I have to poke behind the anger to see what the real emotion is feeding the anger.

   Anger and grief are very much intertwined for me. I read about the colonial decimation of bison, which facilitated Indigenous genocide in the Great Plains, or I read about a Chinese mining company poisoning a river in Zambia, and I get angry. I get so sad because I’m like, It does not have to be this way. It makes my blood boil seeing what we do to the earth and what we do to each other.

   Colonial powers, Western powers do not treat the earth like a living being; we treat it as something to extract things from. A lot of times that’s how Black people are treated by an oftentimes apathetic population. It’s like, What can we extract from Black people, whether that be labor or culture or inventiveness? That extraction drains us and makes us angry and bitter. If we can have more candid conversations about anger and the way anger shows up in our lives, we would all be better for it.

   Within the canon of ecocriticism and environmental writing, there’s so much talk about sublime beauty and romanticism. Lots of this removes humans from nature, as if the only way nature can be beautiful is without human influence. Amid climate change, we’re seeing more dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives. I think these perspectives are two sides of the same coin: what does it say when the only way we can think of human engagement with nature is nature punishing us, or us being completely separate from nature? Anger has a place in all of that storytelling.

Ashia Ajani, with Amirio Freeman, “Ashia Ajani Mulls Over Mullein,” PLANTCRAFT (May 5, 2025).#

2. I had an Inflammation of the Bronchial Tube very bad and the phlegm nearly choked me to death. A young man who knows these herbs came to my house and said to me: “If I only knew where there was some Mullein, I could help.” I didn’t know where to get it , and he left , but he came back and this is what he did: Heated the Mullein Leaves in warm vinegar, then put on my neck and chest and later made me drink a cup or two of Peppermint Tea and it helped me very much.

   Writes Mrs. F. N., Mascoutah, Ill.

   Editor’s Note - A knowledge of the medicinal value of herbs will save you many dollars, and much suffering. Our 400-page Herbalist Book describes all American medicinal roots and herbs. It contains color plates and photographic reproductions of hundreds of plants. Price only 25c.

The Old Herb Doctor: His Secrets and Treatments (Hammond, Indiana: Hammond Book Company, 1941), p. 35.#

3. Mullein [wullena] is warm and dry and somewhat cold. Let whoever has a weak and sad heart, cook mullein with meat, fish, or pastry, but without any other herbs, and eat this often; the person’s heart will be strengthened and made happy. Let whoever has a hoarse voice or a sore throat which causes pain in the chest cook mullein and an equal amount of fennel in good wine, strain it through a piece of cloth, and then drink this often. The person’s voice will return and the chest will be healed.

Hildegard von Bingen, from Physica (c. 1150), Hildegard’s Healing Plants: From Her Medieval Classic Physica, trans. Bruce W. Hozeski (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 115-116.#

Supplementum#

• Ashia Ajani, with Amirio Freeman. “Ashia Ajani Mulls Over Mullein,” PLANTCRAFT (May 5, 2025).

• “Common Mullein.—V. Thapsus,” from Mrs. William Starr Dana [Frances Theodora Parsons], A Selection of Fifty Plates from “How to Know the Wild Flowers” (New York: C. Scribners’ Sons, 1894), p. 151.

• County-level U.S. distribution of common mullein. Early Detection & Distribution Mapping System (EDDMapS). The University of Georgia - Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health.

• Global distribution of common mullein. . The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Fig. 3. Louise A. Field, Peter Rabbit and His Pa, illustr. Virginia Albert (Chicago, Illinois: The Saalfield Publishing Company, 1917), p. 27.