Fall 2002

If you've never studied the milkweeds, you're in for a treat. Start with the flowers. Among this region's 14 native species, the blooms may be orange, white, green, yellow, pink, purple, or, in the common milkweed, a dusty rose lavender. Yet they all have the same distinctive structure.

From five swept-back petals emerge a cluster of five curved cups. From these emerge five horns.

The pollination mechanism is a tricky one. Many of the rarer milkweeds depend on persistent burly bumblebees, large butterflies, or rare specialized pollinators. These tend to go mostly unpollinated. But when the first flower in a cluster does get lucky, the others all wither away, and that flower transforms to one large pod.

Rare milkweeds should be protected and left alone. But common milkweed grows in weed fields, roadsides, and alleys. Its pods are a great favorite for children of all ages, who like to launch the plumed seeds on airborne journeys.

Milkweeds are unpopular with most insect pests, since their thick white milky juice is bitterly poisonous. But their leaves are relished by — and the only food of — the monarch butterfly. Swarms of monarchs that migrate through each fall are testimony to the vast numbers of milkweeds that survive here and there.

Pollinators swarm the milkweeds because of their copious sweet nectar. But the flowers of the rare woodland milkweed, shown here, are verily dripping with ambrosia. Why haven't the bees and butterflies been slurping it up? Happy to say, the plant shown here is in a restored rare ecosystem under an oak in my back yard. Sad to say, one day last July, all the bees and butterflies vanished from my neighborhood, and returned only gradually over a few weeks. Someone had sprayed a ferocious amount of poison in his yard or garden. A barbarous act, if unintentionally so.

So we had no pods on my woodland milkweed this year, and few seeds at all from any of the plants of midsummer. But in the forest preserves and elsewhere, here and there throughout the region, 14 species of milkweeds have been successfully dodging poison and predator for a long time. May they succeed forever!

Photos of milkweed and bumblebee by Carol Freeman. Milkweed seeds by Joe Nowak. Words by Stephen Packard.

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