Wedding Candles in the wind

I’m often asked what my favourite plant is. My answer is usually what I’ve discovered blooming that morning. In spring it will probably be a crocus and in June, a rose. But for the last few weeks I’ve had a new favourite that has persisted in delighting me. It’s a plant that was given to me by a friend last year, just three verbascum seedlings in a pot.

Without much thought, I stuck them in the flowerbed and they grew well. I’ve grown different varieties of these popular plants that send up spires of flowers a foot or so high. I learned the new plants in my garden were a variety called Verbascum chaixii ‘Wedding Candles’. Only supposed to reach a metre, they shot up this year, tall spires like candles in the wind (sorry Elton).

This new favourite is a beauty covered with masses of tiny white flowers that have purple centres and bright orange anthers full of pollen. It blooms and reblooms for weeks in mid summer and it buzzes. It buzzes because it attracts more bees and other insects than any other plant in my garden. I watched as bumble bees zoomed in and out, their pouches laden with pollen, which bodes well for these friendly pollinators. If I plant more, they might drown out the sound of traffic. 

Verbascum isn’t fussy about soil, even gravelly soil, and once established it’s drought tolerant and needs little water, like the wild species. These garden perennials are usually sold as verbascum but sometimes referred to as mullein, although that name is usually reserved for a wilder version, Verbascum thapsus.

There’s enough of the wild mullein about that it might be thought a native plant; however, it’s original home was Europe, North Africa, and Asia, but not here. It became naturalized across North America long ago after it was brought here by settlers who considered it useful as a folk medicine for pulmonary diseases.

It’s sometimes confused with goldenrod, simply because the name suits the plant, a rod-like spire that grows as high as three metres, and it is somewhat golden, covered in yellow flowers. Like the garden versions, it’s also a magnet to a menagerie of pollinators. It can be seen growing in full sun in fields, roadsides, waste land, or anywhere soil has been disturbed. A biennial plant, this mullein produces a rosette of velvety grey leaves the first year then in the second year it sends up the majestic spires, so majestic that like goldenrod it’s popular in Europe as a garden plant.

Depending on where it’s found growing, mullein has other common names, and many uses. Those soft velvety leaves found a use on the western plains by cowboys, probably after discovering the general store had run out of toilet paper — if it ever had any. It’s unlikely that would be a reason to grow the plant in our gardens unless you’re planning to live totally off the grid, so I’d stick to the more refined versions of verbascum.