Common Mullein’s Second Year: The Velvet Rosette Preparing to Flower
For several years, I did not really maintain my vegetable garden. I still grew a few familiar Korean vegetables and herbs in containers on the porch—perilla, lettuce, minari, dolnamul, and tomatoes—but I mostly left the garden itself alone. Before long, volunteer plants began filling the open ground. Some people might look at them and see only weeds. I do not really think of them that way. Curly dock and broadleaf dock appeared, along with oxeye daisy, plantain, two kinds of thistle, common vetch, bird’s-foot trefoil, self-heal, and many other plants that had found their own places in my forgotten garden. Then one especially large plant caught my attention. A Common Mullein plant in my Washington garden as its central flower stalk begins to develop. Its broad gray-green leaves were covered in such dense, soft hairs that they looked almost like velvet. The leaves spread outward around the base, but the center of the plant was beginning to change. A tightly folded structure was ri...