Mullein

Teacher’s Story

“I like the plants that you call weeds,⁠—
Sedge, hardhack, mullein, yarrow,⁠—
Which knit their leaves and sift their seeds
Where any grassy wheel-track leads
Through country by-ways narrow.”

—Lucy Larcom.

We take much pride unto ourselves because we belong to the chosen few of the “fittest,” which have survived in the struggle for existence. But, if we look around upon other members of this select band, we shall find many lowly beings which we do not ordinarily recognize as our peers. Mullein is one of them, and after we study its many ways of “winning out” then may we bow to it and call it “brother.”

I was wandering one day in a sheep pasture and looking curiously at the few plants left uneaten. There was a great thistle with its sharp spines and the pearly everlasting—too woolly and anaemic to be appetizing even to a sheep; and besides these, there was an army of mullein stalks—tall, slim, and stiff-necked, or branching like great candelabra, their upper leaves adhering alternately to the stalks for half their length. I stopped before one of them and mentally asked, “Why do the sheep not relish you? Are you bitter?” I took a bite, Nebuchadnezzar-like, and to my untrained taste it seemed as good fodder as any; but my tongue smarted and burned for some time after, from being pricked by the felt which covered the leaf. I recalled the practical joke of which my grandmother once made me the victim; she told me that to be beautiful, I needed only to rub my cheeks with mullein leaves, an experience which convinced me that there were other things far more desirable than beauty—comfort, for instance. This felt on the mullein is beautiful, when looked at through a microscope; it consists of a fretwork of little, white, sharp spikes. No wonder my cheeks were red one day and purple the next, and no wonder the sheep will not eat it unless starved! This frostlike felt covering not only keeps the mullein safe from grazing animals but it also keeps the water from evaporating from the leaf and this enables the plant to withstand drought. I soon discovered another means devised by the mullein for this same purpose, when I tried to dig up the plant with a stick; I followed its taproot down far enough to understand that it was a subsoiler and reached below most other plants for moisture and food. Although it was late autumn, the mullein was still in blossom; there were flowers near the tip and also one here and there on the seed-crowded stem. I estimated there were hundreds of seed-capsules on that one plant; I opened one, still covered with the calyx-lobes, and found that the mullein was still battling for survival; for I found this capsule and many others inhabited by little brown-headed white grubs, which gave an exhibition of St. Vitus dance as I laid open their home. They were the young of a snout beetle, which is a far more dangerous enemy of the mullein than is the sheep.

The mullein plant is like the old woman who lived in a shoe in the matter of blossom-children; she has so many that they are unkempt and irregular, but there are normally four yellow or white petals and a five-lobed calyx. I have never been able to solve the problem of the five stamens which, when the flower opens, are folded together in a knock-kneed fashion. The upper three are bearded below the anthers, the middle being the shortest. The lower two are much longer and have no fuzz on their filaments; they at first stand straight out, with the stigma between them; but after the upper anthers have shed their pollen, these stamens curve up like boars’ teeth and splash their pollen on the upper petals, the stigma protruding desolately and one-sidedly below. Later the corolla, stamens and all, falls off, leaving the stigma and style attached to the seed-capsule.

The color of the mullein flowers varies from lemon-yellow to white. The filaments are pale yellow; the anthers and pollen, orange. The seed-capsule is encased in the long calyx-lobes, and is shaped like a blunt egg. Cutting it in two crosswise, the central core, tough and flattened and almost filling the capsule, is revealed and, growing upon its surface, are numberless tiny, brown seeds, as fine as gunpowder. Later the capsule divides partially in quarters, opening wide enough to shake out the tiny seeds with every wandering blast. The seed, when seen through a lens, is very pretty; it looks like a section of a corncob, pitted and ribbed. A nice point of investigation for some junior naturalist is to work out the fertilization of the mullein flower, and note what insects assist. The mullein has another spoke in the wheel of its success. The seed, scattered from the sere and dried plants, settles comfortably in any place where it can reach the soil, and during the first season grows a beautiful velvety rosette of frosted leaves. No wonder Europeans grow it in gardens under the name of the “American velvet plant.” These rosettes lie flat under the snow, with their tap-roots strong and already deep in the soil, and are ready to begin their work of food-making as soon as the spring sun gives them power.