Asclepias syriaca

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Common Milkweed, Hidden Beauty

Gusty winds tease common milkweed seeds from their pods.

Its beauty isn’t on the outside. Common milkweed (Asclepias Syriaca), despite its attractiveness to monarch butterflies, isn’t the showiest of plants. Its large, smooth leaves and warty pods lack the delicacy of many native plants. Milkweed’s beauty is hidden within its pods.

Tiny green pods arise from fertilized pink, aromatic flowers.

Over the summer, small, perfumed pink flowers are fertilized and form tiny green pods or follicles. As they ripen, they grow to three-to-five inches in length. Inside, oval-shaped flat, brown seeds tethered to white, satiny strands designed for wind dispersal are arranged around a central column. Each is neatly tucked into a crevice on a membrane attached to the top and bottom of the pod.

Oval-shaped seeds attached to satiny strands are neatly arranged around a central column.

Wind fluffs the silky fibers into parachutes to disperse the seeds.

When the seeds mature, the pods dry and crack open. As wind enters the split pods, the silky strands unfurl and balloon into parachutes. One by one the seeds spin out of the pod like shimmering wind-borne dancers that glow in the autumn sunlight. I love to watch them sail — sometimes floating on a gentle breeze, sometimes scurrying on gusty winds. The empty pod is pretty too: Cream-to-gold colored and smooth inside, except for the center membrane, which is grooved to anchor individual seeds.

The empty pod is satiny smooth except for the grooved central column where the seeds were attached.

These lovely seeds used to be rare in Twin Cities urban areas, but now many residents grow one or more of 14 native milkweed species in their yard and boulevard gardens to attract monarchs and other butterflies.¹

Milkweed plants are the sole host plant for monarch butterflies.

¹When handling milkweed, it’s best to wear gloves and eye protection. The plant’s milky latex sap can cause eye and skin irritation on contact. According to several sources, the sap is slightly toxic to humans if eaten in large amounts. Animals are also affected by it, but most avoid the plant. This substance helps to make monarch butterfly caterpillars unpalatable to birds.

Sources and Further Reading

Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden Common Name Plant List

Milkweeds of Iowa and Minnesota (Xerxes.org)

Minnesota Milkweeds for Monarchs

Monarch Joint Venture

Spreading Milkweed, not Myths

 

 

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Seeking Winter’s Beauty

Nature’s beauty is spare and uncomplicated in winter.

In the Upper Midwest, there’s little that isn’t hidden under layers of snow in January. What remains is pared down to basics: bare branches, open seed pods and stripped down stalks. Their lines are clean, sharp, punctuated by frozen fruit and picked-over seed heads.

Prickly seed heads of Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta).

Plump apples of the dwarf Tina Sargent crabapple (Malus sargentii ‘Tina’).

January’s color palette is simple: white, black, shades of brown, berry reds and green hues of conifers. Cloudless skies range from deep to powder blue during daylight, softening to a blue tint after sunset, and on moonshine nights, the snow glows with a cold, blue light seen only in midwinter.

 

Tart fruit of the nonpoisonous staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina).

Male downy woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens).

Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca).

To find winter’s beauty requires ignoring the persistent desire to “just go back inside” to warm up! It is necessary to open one’s senses to the more subtle signs of life: perhaps you’ll hear the call of a black-capped chickadee, the tap-tap of a woodpecker looking for food, or the soft hoots of courting great-horned owls. Maybe you’ll spot the showy red of sumac fruit or plump crabapples. Perhaps you’ll touch the satiny inner lining of a milkweed pod, or the prickly seed head of a black-eyed Susan. If you’re fortunate enough to have native grasses growing nearby, stop for a moment and inhale their sweet, ripe scent — a lingering gift of autumn. Whenever you go outside, try to be open to winter’s spare beauty so very different from its abundance in spring, summer and autumn. Already the days are lengthening and the the sun is warmer. Winter will soon give way to spring.

A quiet place to observe winter’s beauty.

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Milkweed Seeds

Last summer, hummingbirds, butterflies and bees nectared in the pale pink blossoms of common milkweed that grows in our back garden.  Now in mid-November, the thick, fibrous stalks and leaves have died back.  Last week, the rough, oval pods split open and released their small, coffee-brown seeds, each one surrounded by an arc of silk to sail it on the wind.  They seem such delicate creations to be floating November’s raw skies and, for me, symbolize the beauty and life that will return next spring.

The delicate-looking seeds of common milkweed escape their pods.

The delicate-looking seeds of common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) escape their pods.

Before the pod opens, the milkweed seeds are tightly arranged in orderly rows around a central core.

Before the pod opens, the milkweed seeds and their silky “parachutes” are tightly arranged in orderly rows around a central column.

Last summer a bumblebee fertilized the flower that formed the milkweed pod I photographed above.

Last July, a bumblebee fertilized the blossoms that became today’s seeds.