July 16, 1999

     Common Milkweed

If you enjoy the perfume of flowers, this is the time to get close to the fragrant flower clusters of the common milkweed.  A native perennial plant growing 3 to 4 feet tall, the common milkweed is also the most familiar milkweed plant and a main food for monarch butterfly caterpillars.  It can be found in sunny spots in meadows, fields and along roadsides.

A striking peculiarity of the plant is the large amount of milk-white sticky juice that flows from the slightest wound to a stem, flower or leaf.  The milky juice is not the sap of the plant but a special secretion and quite distasteful, which is the reason grazing animals avoid the milkweed.  The secretion was used as glue by some early European settlers.

Those settlers also used the long silky threads on the seeds to stuff pillows and mattresses.  During World War I, children were paid a penny a pound for the milkweed silk, which was used to stuff life preservers.

Young stems, leaves, pods and flower buds have sometimes been cooked like asparagus.  Although the milky juice is bitter and mildly toxic, both of these properties can be eliminated by boiling, using several changes of water.