Mullein, Verbascum thapsus, is a tall biennial with a rosette of soft woolly grey leaves in its first year and a single stately flower-spike of yellow blossoms in its second. Its dense, dry, felted stalk was dipped in tallow or fat and burned as a torch or taper, a use recorded in its many names, hag's taper, candlewick, torches, and its down was used as tinder and lamp-wick. Its old domestic use for coughs and chest complaints is given here as folk history and not as medical advice.
The plant's thick, velvety leaves gave it another set of practical country names, Quaker's flannel and flannel-leaf among them, for a texture soft enough that the leaves were tucked into shoes as an improvised insole and, according to well-attested American folk tradition, used by settlers and cowboys as makeshift toilet paper on the trail, a use as unglamorous as any in this atlas but genuinely recorded in frontier reminiscence. The same soft leaf, dried and rolled, was smoked as a folk remedy for asthma and chest complaints in both European and Native American practice, a use recorded here strictly as history and not as any recommendation.
Mullein's tall flower-spike also opens its yellow blooms only a few at a time, a handful each day scattered up and down the stalk rather than all at once, an unhurried flowering habit that let country observers read the plant almost as a slow calendar of the passing summer.