'Nature's loo roll': Verbascum, one of the most curious — and useful — plants you'll find in an English country garden

Of all the plants generous to Mankind, verbascum is surely one of the foremost. Many of its folkloric names reveal its sundry practical uses throughout the ages; others have a Biblical whiff or are simply bewildering, their basis lost in time. For medieval women who sought to bring colour to their cheeks, verbascum was known as Quaker’s rouge, a rub of its hairy leaves on delicate skin producing the desired flush. Medieval religion dubbed it Adam’s flannel and Moses’s blanket and its tall stalk was Adam’s or Aaron’s rod. Meanwhile, rural folk spoke of hare’s beard, velvet dock, feltwort, shepherd’s club and beggar’s blanket.

The dried stalks were the basis of torches from Roman times and, before cotton came into use, they served as the core for tallow candles, adding hag candlewick, hag’s taper and torch-wort to its folkloric nomenclature. In the American West, to which this plant (native to Europe and the Middle East) was introduced early in the 18th century, those same leaves were known as cowboys’ loo paper. Gardeners, however, simply know it as verbascum or as common, great or greater mullein, from the Anglo-French term for ‘soft’.

More important, however, were the medicinal properties of the plant. Classical-era herbalists Pliny the Elder, Galen and Dioscorides — ‘the father of pharmacognosy’ — identified it as treatment for sundry complaints and their wisdom was acknowledged by John Gerard in his Herball of 1597. Its leaves had ‘a digesting and cleansing quality’, he declared. Boiled and laid on ‘large swellings and inflammations of the eyes’ to cure and ease pain, they were ‘good for them that are broken inwardly’ and would treat ‘the old cough’.

Similarly, treacle dribbled on verbascum leaves or combined in an ointment with ‘old hog’s grease’ cured haemorrhoids, whereas placing its leaves in shoes or inside socks day and night ‘brought down in young maidens their desired sickness’. Fumes from burned leaves breathed in twice a day eased lung congestion and Gerard noted that Kent husbandmen gave leaves to cattle to combat cough, for which quality they were known as bullock’s lungwort.

In 1653, Nicholas Culpeper further propounded the virtues of the plant, adding that the root boiled in red wine was ‘profitable for those that are bursten, and for cramps and convulsions’. A gargle eased toothache, too, and a decoction of flowers in distilled water was ‘said to be the most excellent remedy for gout’. Verbascum juice melted rough warts away and leaves and seed that was boiled in wine would ‘draw forth speedily thorns or splinters gotten into the flesh, ease the pains and heal them also’. A similar treatment would dissolve and heal boils in the groin. Clearly, no medieval doctor could ignore this essential curative and its abilities to tackle a spectrum of physical discomforts are sustained by modern herbalists.

Verbascum has some 300 varieties around the world and horticulture has produced a number of cultivars to make statuesque decorative contributions to our borders, but the original and most familiar is V. thapsus, its name derived either from Thapsos, a Sicilian community, or from Thapsus in ancient Tunisia and classified by Linnaeus in 1753.

A generous rosette of broad hairy leaves of silvery hue appears in its first year, with a stout stem an inch thick and up to 6ft in height, clad in small yellow flowers in the second. Groups of blooms open first from the base and then appear progressively up the stem, each bunch displaying at sunrise and closing in the afternoon, the process lasting from June through to August and offering an ongoing attraction especially to bees and hoverflies. If these or other pollinators fail in their duties, the flowers are self-fertilising anyway.

The plant then starts to wither, but its resolution continues in prolonged and prolific seed production. Researchers in California, US (where the plant is an invasive weed), have calculated that each flower produces a capsule with up to 700 seeds, with the total from a single stem approaching a quarter of a million. In the right conditions, one-third may germinate and most fall close to a parent, ensuring ongoing colonisation.

Verbascum tolerates a variety of locations and Gerard wrote that it seeded freely on ‘the borders of pastures and ploughed fields, or causeways and in other untilled places’. He recorded the plant’s appearance ‘in great plenty’ in Eltham in Kent, Blackheath and Highgate in London and in ‘most countries of England that are of sandy soil’. Seeds from two million years ago found in cliffs at West Runton on the Norfolk coast in a geological layer known as the Cromer Forest Bed testify to its historic native distribution in this lucky land.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.