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Large, placid mulleins, as summer advances, velvety in texture, of a light greenish-drab color, growing everywhere in the fields at first earth's big rosettes in their broad-leav'd low cluster-plants, eight, ten, twenty leaves to a plant plentiful on the fallow twenty-acre lot, at the end of the lane, and especially by the ridge-sides of the fences then close to the ground, but soon springing up leaves as broad as my hand, and the lower ones twice as long so fresh and dewy in the morning stalks now four or five, even seven or eight feet high.
The fourth generation would cover land and sea, from pole to pole, one hundred layers deep. But there is no such danger. Year by year the mulleins hold their own and no more. Any particular field may have more or less, but in the long run the average for a district is about the same. Some of the seeds are poor and thin. These scarcely sprout.
Some thin and ascetic-looking old mules and wizen donkeys had been taken out of the shafts, and were now nibbling the short wayside grass, the young burdocks and mulleins, which, but for the rain, would have filled their mouths with dust.
Mulleins "imperial sceptre" is the pretty Russian name began to do sentinel duty along the roadside; sumach appeared in the thickets of the forests, where the graceful cut-leaved birch of the north was rare. The Lombardy poplar, the favorite of the Little Russian poets, reared its dark columns in solitary state. At last, Kieff, the Holy City, loomed before us in the distance.
And truly it was no mean sight to behold every small twig becrusted with ice, and glittering famously like silver-work or crystal, as the rays of the moon did strike upon them. Moreover, the earth was covered with frozen snow, smooth and hard like to marble, through which the long rushes, the hazels, and mulleins, and the dry blades of the grasses, did stand up bravely, bedight with frost.
The little flowers which had dotted the grassy robe of the rolling hills had long since faded away under the ardent sun, and now there appeared only the denuded stalks of the mulleins and the flaunting banners of the goldenrod.
James's to Whitehall, and of the fatal window of the Banqueting-hall which had been pointed out to her, and then her thoughts flew back again to that vault in the castle yard, and she saw only too vividly in memory that open vault, veiled partly by nettles and mulleins, which was the unblest, unknown grave of the old playfellow who had so loved her mother and herself.
The green garden path, the tufts of flowers, purple and white columbines, and great oriental red poppies with their black chaps and mulleins tall and yellow, this flamy garden which had been a garden for a thousand years, scooped out in the little hollow among the snake-infested commons. He had made it flame with flowers, in a sun cup under its hedges and trees. So old, so old a place!
Besides these letters, I've had word that plant-hair is put to the following uses: On some plants it catches insects and helps to eat them; in others, the hair sends out a kind of juice which keeps away insects that might harm the plant; on the mulleins, the stiff hairs are supposed to prevent cattle from browsing on them; and on yet others, the hairs suck in gases and liquids as part of the food of the plants.
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