A friend of mine decided to start his own microprairie last year. But when he walked into his local garden center and asked if they had any milkweed, the employee there said, “What do you want that for? It’s a weed.”
Sigh.
You might notice that a lot of plants have the word “weed” in their names. There’s a couple different stories behind this. One is that 200-300 years ago, the word “weed” didn’t mean quite the same thing it does today. It referred more to plants that were just growing wild as opposed to plants that were cultivated. The other story is that when the early settlers from Europe started naming things here in North America, anything they didn’t recognize—and again wasn’t cultivated—they called “weed.” It didn’t mean it was bad, it just wasn’t something grown intentionally in a garden or as a crop.
Today, the word “weed” refers to something fast-growing, fast-seeding and doing those things in the wrong place. And now, because of history, a lot of very desirable plants are today looked at undesirable. That’s too bad, because it’s causing us to get rid of plants that the local web of life really depends on. Case in point, milkweed.
Common milkweed, Aesclepias syriaca, is the one we’re most familiar with here in the U.S. You used to be able to see it all over the place—at the back of people’s yards, along the roadside, on the edges of farm fields, big oval leaves flapping in the breeze. But over the years, it’s been steadily eradicated because to us it didn’t seem to have a real use. It’s milky sap that milkweeds get their name from is somewhat toxic, it seeds prodigiously, and pretty much just got in the way.
But then the monarchs started disappearing, and people started making the connection. We started gaining a new appreciation for this versatile and tough plant. We even started putting this “weed” in our gardens intentionally, and—this is crazy—started selling the seeds in garden stores. Milkweed had become much more than a weed.
Why milkweed is awesome
Probably the most important thing about the Aesclepias genus—milkweed—is that it’s the only thing monarch caterpillars can eat. If we want monarch butterflies, we need monarch caterpillars, and they need milkweed.
Common milkweed is a great place to start. They’re easy to grow, the seeds are easy to get hold of (except maybe at the garden center in my friend’s hometown), and they’re pretty hard to kill. And like all milkweeds, they get beautiful flowers, usually pink, that give off a light sweet scent, almost like lilacs.
Their one drawback is that they do like to multiply through both their seeds and their roots. If you have a big patch that you want to fill up for bees and butterflies, then common milkweed is perfect. You can start with a few plants and watch them do their thing as they bloom, produce flowers, then pods. In the fall those pods will pop open and release clouds of brown seeds carried away on little silky white parachutes.
But if you don’t have a lot of space and you don’t want your small patch taken over by one thing in a few years, there are plenty of other milkweed varieties that aren’t as aggressive.
The ones native to the upper Midwest—and the ones I chose for the milkweed extension on my garden this year—are the swamp or red milkweed (A. incarnata), showy milkweed (A. speciosa), Sullivant’s milkweed (A. sullivantii), whorled milkweed (A. verticillata), and of course my favorite, butterfly weed (A. tuberosa). I put all of these in my milkweed garden, except for the butterfly weed, which went in another spot where it would have more room. They’re all doing pretty well, especially the swamp milkweed, which really took off.
Planting and growing milkweed
I got all of my milkweed as plants at area garden centers, but apparently it’s not that easy to get native milkweed in all parts of the country, and it’s important to get milkweed varieties that are native to your region. Those local species are what the monarchs, bees and other pollinators in your area are adapted to the best.
To help with this, organizations like the Xerces Society, which focuses on protecting butterflies, bees and other insects, have started programs to get people familiar with the importance of milkweed. The Xerces Society is part of Project Milkweed, a partnership working to grow monarch breeding habitat. But a scarcity of milkweed seed in many regions of the country is making it hard for people to grow these important native plants. To help, Xerces has a milkweed seed-finder map on its web site showing where you can order milkweed seeds appropriate for your region. Xerces’ site also has a list of pollinator conservation seed mixes specific to particular regions and/or particular purposes, like pollinating orchards.
One thing to look out for, though, is milkweed varieties that aren’t native to your area. The Xerces Society recommends staying away especially from tropical milkweed like the balloon plant milkweed (Gomphocarpus physocarpus), (not to be confused with balloon flower), even though many places sell it. It’s a native of southeast Africa, and it has been associated with carrying Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, a parasite that can interfere with monarchs’ reproductive and migration patterns. Monarchs need all the help they can get, so let’s not be importing in more things to kill them.
Besides buying seeds or plants, you can hunt for and gather milkweed seeds from plants in your area. Common milkweed especially is getting easier to find. Put on your hiking shoes, grab some baggies, and go out into the countryside (or anywhere else you’ve spotted milkweed in the wild) and look for milkweed with pods that are full grown, brown and dry and are just on the verge of popping open to release their seeds. Just be sure to ask permission before going onto anyone’s private property. This post from Michigan State University gives good tips on finding and growing your own milkweed from seed. Once you have your seeds, Monarchwatch.org has detailed instructions on how to grow them.
One thing I’m discovering during this first summer of growing milkweed is that for monarchs, it’s a numbers game. I found three little monarch caterpillars on my showy milkweed, but by the next day they were gone. I suspect they ended up as some baby bird’s breakfast. So if monarchs are going to make it, we need a lot of milkweed to provide not just food but also a lot of cover for those caterpillars.
I can’t wait for my milkweed to start blooming, then producing seed pods. There’s something kind of magical about watching that milkweed fluff floating through a late-summer afternoon, knowing that it’s going off somewhere to grow and be part of a buffet for even more monarchs, bees and other pollinators. Every little bit helps.