Meant to add a second photo

Yes & up to you.

i was kinda expecting this one.. lol ... if you leave it.. expect at least 100 more next year ... kill it ....ken

There is nothing wrong with biodiversity. There is no need to kill the plant, it is not invasive in an environment like on the OP's pictures. Even if there were five of them growing around the next year, it is very easy to control, just cut off the flower stalks before seeds start to ripen.

Family- Scrophulariaceae,Genus-Verbascum, Species-thapsis.It'a biennial,so it's gone after this year anyway.Ken is right about the warning"at least".The seeds from one plant can come up for years and years,so if you decide later on that you don't want it, you will still have to deal with seedlings.The seeds are so minute that they become invisible when they land on ground,so you can't retrieve them. I grew it because I did like it,but I have a small garden and the plant's basal leaves take up a huge space,but if you have room for it and like it just leave it.It looks like you have the space.If you let it go to seed you willhave to thin out at least a hundred or so to keep it looking nice.Indians used the large furry leaves to line their mocassins and smoking the dried leaves is purported to help certain health conditions. I have tried smoking it and it was very smooth and I felt a Ricolla lozenge type sensation.The space your Mullien is in has room for a few more. I'm not crazy about the way the flower head looks when the bloom fades,but it's the architecture of the plant that draws you in.A very great architectural plant.

I love fuzzy leaves. If a mullein popped up in my garden I'd let it go to seed then use it as a self seeder, pulling up seedlings where I don't want them and cutting most of the flowers stalks off before they go to seed. It's free and definitely well adapted to your garden, my favorite kind of plants!

It's a Eurasian species naturalized in the US. As several folks have said, the seeds are going to be in the hundreds to thousands and can remain viable for decades, so plan to either cut the stalk after it flowers or expect to remove seedlings for as long as you live here. In areas where meadows are part of the native ecology, it can outcompete native plants, but it isn't a real problem everywhere. I would probably check with your state department of natural resources (or whatever it is called) to figure out if it is much of an issue in your area.

There are a lot of beautiful natives that can do the job this Mullien is doing.Thats the main reason I don't grow it anymore, because it's not native and IS invasive.There were one or two growing in an unplanted wheat field down the street and they looked nice,but the next year there were hundreds,and it did not look good at all.The seeds don't just germinate in the spring,so thinning out seedlings becomes a season long chore.Veronicastrum,Culver's root reaches the same height,has multiple flower stalks,and attracts many more pollinators than Verbascum.It's closely related to Mullien.White flowers.Be open to new species,there are a lot of possibilities for making that spot a beautiful vista.

Veronicastrum also occurs in various shades of purple.

Invaluable plant for butterflies of all types! And preventing unwanted mass spreading is so easy.... Once the flowers die, simple yank the plant. The flowers also smell sooo nice.

It's unfortunate so many people are of the opinion that anything humans didn't plant needs to be destroyed. If you like having butterflies around this "weed" is a keeper.... I've even seen Hummingbirds frequenting them.... You can sit and watch them flutter around its flowers for hours on end. It is hardly the environmental catastrophe folks are so quick to warn of.

Verbascum is pretty, too, and a butterfly magnet.... But, the flowers have no scent... And in areas where it grows side-by-side with Mullein, you'll find far more butterflies attracted to the wild Mullein. I don't know why that's the case, but it is. One of my local botanical gardens has the two species growing very close to each other in a few spots (they let them be) and photographers setup cameras waiting to capture the butterflies, often sitting for hours waiting for those "perfect" shots... When you do that, you soon realize that the "weed" is seeing more activity than the "more desirable" Verbascum -- which technically is also wild in many parts of the country, though there are now hybrid cultivars around, too.

If you like the look, check out Verbascum 'Sixteen Candles'. Perennial, non aggressive and gorgeous. I cut it back when bloom is done and get a second flush later in summer.

'Verbascum is pretty, too, and a butterfly magnet.... But, the flowers have no scent... And in areas where it grows side-by-side with Mullein, you'll find far more butterflies attracted to the wild Mullein'.

Fizgig, did you mean Veronicastrum, rather than Verbascum, since Mullein is Verbascum?

"Stop spreading misinformation like this. It is a foreign invasive. Just because you observe some insects feeding on it doesn't mean it is invaluable to the ecosystem."

While native and non-native is a pretty clear distinction, invasive is definitely a gradient. In many areas of eastern North America, Verbascum has integrated fairly well and is not an 'ecosystem killer' and it doesn't retard ecological succession. From an evolutionary standpoint, insects have had time to adapt to use it as a food source. Common Mullein has been ubiquitous in eastern North America for 200 years...what the OP does with their plant will have absolutely no impact on anything.

That assessment may not hold for other areas of North America, but it does in Virginia.

I can understand dandy's anger.Like him I have become a native purist and I believe no good can ever come out of allowing an alien organism from somewhere else get a foothold on our once pristine continent.In Australia they got used to the Dingo and excepted it as a native animal because of reasoning like this-"people brought it here a few thousand years ago so now it's become a part of the ecosystem." What has happened because of that? The beautiful Tasmanian Wolf,Thylasine and many other unique marsupials and birds have become extinct as a result. I began gardening with a much more Victorian approach and I loved mixing plants,not at all concerned with where they originated from or how they could screw up the environment.Now I want to do my part to start healing the environment and restoring it back to what it looked like before the first humans ever set foot here. I would love to see what that pristine Utopia looked like. I see no wrong in adding some Victorian elements into your garden scheme and using alien plants as long as they are plants that won't be capable of being invasive.We all need these little treats to satisfy our need for beauty.Mullien,thapsis drops a million seeds because it's a biennial and it needs to leave a mark before It perishes.Therin lies the problem.You can think they look pretty,but no where near as pretty as it looked before humans set foot here. I have to be real and know that after all the damage that's already been done it is impossible to ever get things back to the way they were,but it's worth shooting for.