Hambone's Mercantile

One of our more colorful native milkweeds, A. tuberosa has been known as pleurisy root and butterfly milkweed. This beautiful oddball, unlike most milkweeds, does not have a white milky latex when injured. Though less caustic than some other members of it’s family, this plant is still considered mildy toxic. Even so, as humans, its our responsibility to be mindful of our surroundings, and mild toxicity shouldn’t exclude this plant from your garden. The difference between medicine and poison is dose, after all.

The common name pleurisy root refers to the use of this plant as a medicinal herb to counteract inflammation of the lining of lung tissue. Like with many herbs, one must always be careful to consider side-effects of the herb (ie-the potential poisonous affect of that particular plant).

Some individuals have vibrantly orange blooms, while others tend more towards a sunny mango color. These plants provide essential food for the famous monarch caterpillar, and their showy blooms provide nectar for a host of adult butterfly species.

Did you know that most pollinator plants go beyond providing for the pollinator themselves? Here in Texas, we are right in the path of one of the biggest migration flyways in the US. Innumerable birds come through Texas each season. Many species stop here to raise their young. For a large number of those species, that means many many caterpillars to raise those babies. Baby birds must be full sized before they are able to fly. This means they need to grow, and fast. Caterpillars typically provide lots of calories, but some, like the monarch, consume toxins from their food source (milkweed plants) that accumulate in their bodies making them unpalatable at best for anything that may want to eat them.

Monarch caterpillars have learned to work around the toxins milkweeds produce to keep from being over-consumed, and in turn, have adopted the milkweed’s defense system as their own. Pretty cool. Milkweeds are a great addition to a diverse and thriving native ecosystem garden.

To learn more about how to get the best chances of a good germination rate with milkweed seeds, read more here.