Every September the ditches along the road down to Marshall fill up with mullein \u2014 tall grey-green spikes standing up out of gravel and cut bank where not much else wants to grow. My grandmother called it flannel plant, for the soft fuzz on the leaves, and she kept a crock of mullein salve on the shelf above the washbasin every winter I can remember. I still make it every year, the same way she did, with a couple of things she never had on hand \u2014 jojoba oil in place of hog lard, and a double boiler instead of the back corner of the cookstove.<\/p>\n
Mullein isn’t from here, not originally. Verbascum thapsus<\/em> came over with the first settlers, the way a good bit of what grows in an old homeplace dooryard did, and it has spread itself along roadsides and pasture edges and any scraped-bare patch of ground ever since. That’s one worry you don’t have to carry into this one. I dig ginseng and bloodroot with a conservation ethic drilled into me since I was a girl \u2014 take a third, leave two-thirds, mind the season and the law. Mullein asks none of that. It will be standing in that same ditch next September whether you cut an armload or walk on by.<\/p>\n