Verbascum blattariaL.

moth mullein

WFO wfo-0000420104 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Verbascum blattaria, photographed by Violet T.
fig. a Violet T., CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-07 / obs. 204474400
Verbascum blattaria, photographed by Rebecca Gimenez Husted
fig. b Rebecca Gimenez Husted, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205829090
Verbascum blattaria, photographed by Mark Apgar
fig. c Mark Apgar, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205222395
Verbascum blattaria, photographed by Violet T.
fig. d Violet T., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204203166
Verbascum blattaria, photographed by Sergey Cherkasov
fig. e Sergey Cherkasov, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203149684
Verbascum blattaria, photographed by Josep Gesti
fig. f Josep Gesti, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 203522287
Verbascum blattaria, photographed by Mary K. Hanson
fig. g Mary K. Hanson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201947482
Verbascum blattaria, photographed by Yann Kemper
fig. h Yann Kemper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 200364506

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 2,509 observations

Peak flowering in Jun, from 2,509 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 28 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Blattaria vulgaris Fourr.
  • Thapsus blattaria (L.) Raf.
  • Verbascum blattaria f. albiflorum (G.Don) House
  • Verbascum blattaria f. blattaria
  • Verbascum blattaria subsp. repandum (Willd.) Arcang.
  • Verbascum blattaria var. albiflorum Kuntze
  • Verbascum blattaria var. albiflorum G.Don
  • Verbascum blattaria var. brevipedicellatum Halácsy
  • Verbascum blattaria var. crenatum Rouy
  • Verbascum blattaria var. incarnatum Regel
  • Verbascum blattaria var. majus Gaudin
  • Verbascum blattaria var. normalis Kuntze
  • Verbascum blattaria var. rubricaule Regel
  • Verbascum blattaria var. subintegerrimum Regel
  • Verbascum blattariforme Griseb.
  • Verbascum carduifolium Murb.
  • Verbascum carduifolium Murb. ex Hayek
  • Verbascum caucasicum Fisch.
  • Verbascum claytonii Michx.
  • Verbascum cordatum Desf.
  • Verbascum glabrum Mill.
  • Verbascum leptophyllum Bubani
  • Verbascum luridum Salisb.
  • Verbascum nitidum Stokes

and 4 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.