Consider-the-Lilies Web Gallery
Moth Mullein
In the early summer, I've learned that I don't need to go on a hike in the forest or ascend the Blue Ridge Mountains to find some new wildflowers. Just by taking a drive along a "blue highway," such as US Route 11 in the Shenandoah Valley, I've found several types of lilies adorning roadsides, or along the edges of fallow fields, in drainage ditches, and other unlikely places.
In late June I found the beautiful white or yellow Moth Mullein growing in what would seem to be a most inhospitable habitat: a dry, neglected field, offering only a compacted, infertile, gravelly soil.
Undeterred by the rocky soil, however, Verbascum blattaria manages to flourish and decorate the hard-pan, clay shoulder of this rural highway. This is one example of alien flora finding a noninvasive environmental niche in North America. It does not displace native flora because only briars and rough weeds grow on these gravelly slopes!
(The erect flowers to the right in the image above are the equally hardy, vivid blue blossoms of Viper's Bugloss. Other "tough" but beautiful wildflowers to be seen along Virginia roadsides in early summer, include Campion, Dames Rocket, Perennial Sweet Pea, and Longleaf Bluet.)
Here are several of these hardy varieties I found growing together on some abandoned pasture land.
At the top—blue arrow—is some of the first Chicory to appear this summer. Just a few days later the roadsides of the Valley were colored "Chicory blue" as this interesting flowering herb came into bloom en masse in the Valley.
To the upper left—black arrow—is a stalk of Dogbane, with a Dogbane Beetle browsing on its favorite food. (The lily here is the fauna, not the flora!)
The white and yellow blossoms—white arrow and yellow arrow, above, respectively—are the two colors displayed by Verbascum blattaria. (One plant will have one color, not both.)
The common and botanic names are descriptive of the hairy stamens that stand out so strikingly in these blossoms.
Do they look like the antennae of a moth to you?
The common name of this European import is ancient.
It is such an apt label that botanist followed the common name, translating it into scientific Latin as the botanic binomial name.
The prefix, Verbascum, is said to be from the Latin barbascum, meaning with a beard.
The suffix, blattaria, is from the Latin name for moth, blatta —literally "moth-like."
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