Mullein

Mullein, Verbascum thapsus, is a tall biennial with a rosette of soft woolly grey leaves in its first year and a single stately flower-spike of yellow blossoms in its second. Its dense, dry, felted stalk was dipped in tallow or fat and burned as a torch or taper, a use recorded in its many names, hag's taper, candlewick, torches, and its down was used as tinder and lamp-wick. Its old domestic use for coughs and chest complaints is given here as folk history and not as medical advice.

The plant's thick, velvety leaves gave it another set of practical country names, Quaker's flannel and flannel-leaf among them, for a texture soft enough that the leaves were tucked into shoes as an improvised insole and, according to well-attested American folk tradition, used by settlers and cowboys as makeshift toilet paper on the trail, a use as unglamorous as any in this atlas but genuinely recorded in frontier reminiscence. The same soft leaf, dried and rolled, was smoked as a folk remedy for asthma and chest complaints in both European and Native American practice, a use recorded here strictly as history and not as any recommendation.

Mullein's tall flower-spike also opens its yellow blooms only a few at a time, a handful each day scattered up and down the stalk rather than all at once, an unhurried flowering habit that let country observers read the plant almost as a slow calendar of the passing summer.

Culpeper placed mullein under Saturn. Its use as a torch gave it a place in folk magic as a plant of light against darkness and of protection against evil spirits and enchantment: it was carried to keep off wild animals and the workings of witches, and some have proposed it as the moly, the protective herb Hermes gives Odysseus against the spells of Circe. Its tall pale torch of a flower-spike, standing alone on waste ground, made it a natural emblem of guidance and of light held up in dark places. The hag's taper is thus doubly named for the two sides of its lore, the witch and the light that guards against her.

Mullein seeds contain compounds mildly toxic to fish, and steeping crushed seed in a stream to stupefy and catch fish was a documented folk fishing technique in parts of Europe and among some Native American groups, a practical rather than magical use of the plant's one genuinely toxic part, now illegal as a fishing method in most places but recorded here as ethnobotanical history. The tall solitary flower-spike, sometimes reaching six feet or more in a single season, made mullein a natural boundary marker as well as a torch, so that a stand of the plant could serve, quite apart from any magic, simply to mark a path or a grave in open country.