Mullein

mul'lin, in botany, a genus of the Scrophularia family. It is related to the snapdragon, "butter and eggs," monkey flower, gerardia, and painted cup. There are four species in America. All are immigrants from Europe. The common mullein is a tall, stout, coarse, woolly weed. The stem is unbranched, and grows often as tall as a man. It is crowded with heavy, densely woolly leaves. The bases run down the stem, giving it an angled appearance. The stem terminates in a spike of sessile, yellow, irregular flowers. It is a common plant in old fields and by the wayside. Grown from the seed, a rosette of leaves is produced the first year. The flowering stalk shoots up the second season. After going to seed the plant dies.

Large, placid mulleins, as summer advances, velvety in texture, of a light greenish-drab color, growing everywhere in the fields--at first earth's big rosettes in their broad-leav'd low cluster--plants, eight, ten, twenty leaves to a plant--plentiful on the fallow twenty-acre lot, at the end of the lane, and especially by the ridge-sides of the fences--then close to the ground, but soon springing up--leaves as broad as my hand, and the lower ones twice as long--so fresh and dewy in the morning--stalks now four or five, even seven or eight feet high. The farmers, I find, think the mullein a mean, unworthy weed, but I have grown to a fondness for it.--Walt Whitman.