Butterfly Milkweed

Butterfly Milkweed

Common name: Butterfly weed, butterfly milkweed, Indian paintbrush, Indian posy, orange milkweed, orange root, orange swallow-wort, pleurisy root, windroot, fluxroot

Scientific name: Asclepius tuberosa

Family:

Bloom period: May to August

What to look for: The bright, showy orange flowers, sometimes ranging from red to yellow, are in rounded to flat-topped mounds. Each individual flower consists of five petals pointing down, topped by a crown of five erect hoods. In the fall, the fruit pod contains numerous brown seeds, each with a tuft of silky white hairs.

Where to see it: On the uphill part of the Building 2 garden and throughout the Village Green garden.

Benefit to pollinators: Butterfly weed provides food for the larvae of the queen and monarch butterflies, making cultivating it in gardens critical to replacing the monarch’s wild habitat that has been lost. Chemicals in butterfly weed make the larvae’s flesh distasteful to most predators. Other insects drawn to butterfly weed include the dogbane tiger moth, milkweed tussock moth, the unexpected cycnia moth (really, that’s its name!), bees, milkweed bugs, and beetles. Hummingbirds are attracted to the plant’s nectar.

More information: Butterfly weed, a species of milkweed, is called so because butterflies are attracted to the plant by its color and its copious amount of nectar. The genus name, Asclepius, comes from the Greek god of medicine, Askelpios. And, indeed, the list of illnesses and maladies for which both Native Americans and early European Americans used butterfly weed is long: bronchial and pulmonary troubles, pleurisy, skin wounds and rashes, diarrhea, sore throat, colic, and snakebite. Since prehistoric time, Native Americans have used fibers from the stem to make rope and textiles. The down from the seed pods was spun to make candle wicks.