Butterfly Milkweed: An Eye Catcher
The sixth in a series of gorgeous garden plants that are good for the environment! Let’s establish a pollinator garden full of beautiful native plants! (By request.)
This flaming flower will brighten up your garden with its intense orange flowers! This plant is native to most of North America and will shine in your sunny garden.
Environmental Impact
Like Common Milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa is a critical plant for the Monarch Butterfly. Monarch Caterpillars only eat Milkweed, and without it the entire species would die out. Many other pollinators enjoy it as well. It’s a wonderful addition to a pollinator’s garden!
Like Common Milkweed, the pods (picture left) once mature fill with seeds that float on fluffy white down.
Medicine
The medicinal uses are similar to Common Milkweed, but this type of Milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa, was specifically widely used as medicine. It stimulates the vagus nerve, which controls breathing and the diaphram. In turn, that triggers coughing, sweating, and bronchial dilation (USDA). It was effective enough that until the 1930’s, the root was actually listed in the National Formulary (USDA). I didn’t know it, but that’s the book that standardizes the composition and dosage of drugs in the USA. It has existed for over a hundred years. Pretty serious stuff!
Be warned that like many effective medicinal plants, Butterfly Milkweed can be very difficult to dose correctly. Plants of the same species may vary wildly in chemical composition based on time of harvest, growing conditions, soil, weather, and preparation technique. I do not personally recommend harvesting and dosing yourself with Butterfly Milkweed unless you are working under the guidance of an expert.
That said, the entire Milkweed genus, Asclepias, is named after the Greek God of medicine, Asclepias (Missouri Botanical Gardens). So this plant has a strong history of medicinal use!
Literary Flower
Fun fact — I happened to run across this in a book recently! I just finished My Antonia by Willa Cather. She beautifully describes the flower and plants that her characters encounter throughout the Midwest. She specifically mentions orange milkweed.
Across the wire fence, in the long grass, I saw a clump of flaming orange-colored milkweed, rare in that part of the State. I left the road and went around through a stretch of pasture that was always cropped short in summer, where the gaillardia came up year after year and matted over the ground with the deep, velvety red that is in Bokhara carpets.
You can read the entire book here, complete with footnotes that label all the plants with their scientific names.
Notice that she mentions that the orange milkweed had become rare? I think that is because the USDA used to consider it a noxious weed and attempted to eradicate it because eating large quantities can poison livestock (USDA). This policy is no longer recommended.
Fiber Arts
Fun fact — when I wrote about Common Milkweed, I mentioned it was possible to make rope from the stem fibers, and described one woman’s difficulties in making yarn from the seed fluff. Well, apparently this type of milkweed is used not only for rope, but traditionally the seed fibers are actually woven into yarn by the people of the Zuni Pueblo! (USDA) It must make an amazing silky fabric. Based on my own spinning experience and the information found here I would speculate that they are blending the milkweed seed fluff with other plant fibers such as yucca or hemp to make a stronger twist. But that is pure speculation and I don’t know. Does anyone else have any insight?
