jane wrote:
[...]
Now, mulleins are another matter... they are just thugs!

OK, I know about mulleins, if nothing else, and I love them. Let them
spread out their basal rosettes, and they'll smother almost anything.
But they can't keep it up from season to season. Study a patch in the
wild, and you'll see they go like hell one year and then quietly
vanish over the next three. You won't actually find a good patch in
the wild very often, though -- not in the same place, anyhow. This is
because they are biennials which happen to be good at disturbed
ground (they come up like Flanders poppies when there's no
competition), but in spite of having great big leaves they don't work
well with other plants -- I think they make their growth a bit too
late compared with other plants. This is why Great Britain hasn't
been taken over by them and foxgloves, which are similar, though I
haven't watched those with such a beady eye.

The other thing I've found from experiment is that they -- like many
other plants -- will germinate at once from green seeds which most
gardeners would consider unripe. They don't need a winter's cold if
you get them into favourable conditions before the seeds dry out and
go into dormancy. The canny and devoted gardener could, if a showman
or something, profit from this tendency, but in the wild it's a
terrible gamble. Plants which produce enormous numbers of tiny seeds
don't, of course, produce the same number of offspring (I think the
Eagle "comic" when I were a lad announced that the offspring of a
single hen cod would, if they grew to maturity, cause a traffic jam
in the English Channel); I think they behave in way which resembles
hedging one's bets, but won't in an ecosystem result in any one
overall winner. The seedlings come up like buggery, but haven't got
Kelly Smith's oomph in the tackle, never mind Karen Carney's
eye-popping evasiveness.

The other factor which prevents the global domination of verbascums
(verbasca ?) is the mullein moth. I first got interested in mulleins
when some came in with some really crappy soil I was given by a
neighbour a mile away: he was a farmer digging out a slope to build a
retirement bungalow, and I needed some bulk without digging into my
own fields. I did what I wanted to do, and in the spring a few of
these unplanned things came up: at first I thought they were
foxgloves, but then my anorak instincts kicked in, and I knew what
was growing, and encouraged them. The only other stand of mulleins I
knew about was five miles away, and those fizzled out over two to
three years, but clearly there must have been some nearer. The second
year my glorious six-to-eight-foot-high half-wild specimens were
attacked by the caterpillars of the mullein moth: I don't know how
they knew where to come, but they homed in like cruise missiles.
You've got to produce an awful lot of seeds to survive if more than
half of your flowers are destroyed by caterpillars, then most of your
seedlings germinate too soon for any given winter, then most of the
rest fall in unsuitable places.

So I tip my hat to the verbascum family: they aren't thugs, but great
big softies like you and me.

(OT: Holy cow! BBC Radio 3 is doing every bit Beethoven ever wrote
this week: but is that _really_ that wonderful weepy Irish tune, "The
Last Rose of Summer"? I'm not sure my fragile emotional structure can
stand up to this. Boi Jasus! it must be happening, entoirely: it's
moved on to that ridiculous tiddly-iddly-om-pom jiggy thing. I didn't
know Beethoven did Irish, FGS! Reckon he knew how to dance with his
arms strapped to his sides?)

--
Mike.