Mullein

The torch plant. Before candles were common, the tall dried stalk of mullein, dipped in tallow, lit the processions and funerals of Europe — the Romans knew it as a funeral torch, and country people called it hag's taper and candlewick plant for centuries after. A biennial that spends its whole first year as a humble rosette of woolly leaves before sending up, in its second, a golden spire taller than a man: the very rhythm of Saturn, who asks patience before granting stature. Country herbalists valued mullein most as a herb of the chest and the breath — used to soothe the cough, ease the throat and open the airways, and to comfort inflammation of the upper passages — and kept it too as a guardian plant, hung over doorways against ill wishes and carried against wild beasts on lonely roads. To the melancholic temperament, the disposition Saturn rules, it gave its silent, steady flame. The lit taper of the long night — a Saturnian elixir for the contemplative collection.