Mullein

Verbascum is one of the most dramatic tall verticals in the garden — a massive woolly silver-white rosette in the first year, followed by towering yellow flower spikes up to eight feet tall in the second. It is biennial and borderline short-lived perennial, but self-seeds reliably. The architectural quality is extraordinary: nothing else provides the same combination of scale and silvery texture.

Mullein has one of the longest medicinal histories of any European plant. The Greek physician Dioscorides recommended it for diseases of the lung in the first century, and that reputation as a remedy for coughs, congestion, and bronchial complaints followed it for the next two thousand years — the soft leaves and flowers were steeped into teas and syrups to soothe irritated airways. The dried leaves were also smoked or burned and the fumes inhaled to ease the chest, a practice recorded across Europe and later among Indigenous peoples in North America after the plant naturalised there. The bright flowers were steeped in olive oil to make a folk remedy for earache, and the same infused oil was used on wounds and chilblains. Beyond medicine, its other old names hint at its uses: the tall dried stalks were dipped in tallow and burned as torches, giving rise to 'hag's taper' and 'candlewick plant', and the wool-soft leaves earned it 'beggar's blanket' and 'flannel-leaf' for their use as insoles and rough bandaging.