northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here are 2 similar-looking milkweeds, a Purple Milkweed and a couple Common Milkweeds . Though the veins on the leaves of the Purple Milkweed are considered a little more perpendicular to the central vein compared to the Common Milkweed, but mostly I tell the difference based on the much brighter purple flowers of the Purple Milkweed [1]. Color-wise the Swamp Milkweed could be confused with the Purple Milkweed, but the Swamp Milkweed leaves are so much narrower that you shouldn't worry about confusing them. AFAIK these 2 related, similar-looking milkweeds don't hybridize in the wild, though us humans have coaxed some hybridization between species. It sounds like the motivation behind this is the hope that some milkweed cultivars might convince gardeners to plant them and benefiting the environment. A successful hybrid would: Produce the same quality/abundance of nectar as native milkweeds. Would not be able to hybridize in the wild with our native milkweeds. As native plants...

For Throwback Thursday I'm going to show you a Swamp Milkweed from a couple years ago but talk about something I did just yesterday. The Raritan Headwaters Association got a grant to increase the milkweed population in their meadows and recently planted around 500 Swamp Milkweeds [1] at their Fairview Farm location in Bedminster [2]. Historically I've considered Fairview Farm to be one of the muddier places I routinely go, but our relatively dry spring they need to water them to prevent them from dying [3]. Though some of them are close enough to their buildings so that they can be watered via hoses, some of the areas require more physical labor than that. Towards that end, a couple of us volunteers filled up large tubs of water, pulled them (mostly down) into a meadow, and hand-watered them using watering pots. It took about 2.5 hours in all. It wasn't grueling work [4], though Wednesday was an unusually cool day for the start of summer, and I could see it being more cha...

I was thinking recently about all the organisms that benefit from milkweed plants. (Some but not all of these also apply to dogbanes.) Just like trees support insects, birds, squirrels, and lichen as either homes or food, on a smaller scale milkweeds provide similar benefits: Perhaps their most famous connection is to Monarch butterflies, whose caterpillars feed exclusively on milkweeds (mostly leaves). They're not the only lepidopterans whose caterpillars rely on milkweeds; the Milkweed Tussock Moths also eat milkweed (and dogbane). It's not unusual to find aphids on milkweed plants. Some aphids like the Oleander Aphid are invasive, but they are insects that frequently feed on milkweed plants. And if aphids are eating milkweed, this is also likely to attract lady beetles that want to eat the aphids. Finally, the aphid poop is a sweet substance called honeydew that frequently causes Sooty Mold to grow. (I don't recall seeing aphids on dogbane, but they're documented...

Here's one of our native wildflowers, the Swamp Milkweed . It's flowers might remind you of Purple Milkweed or some of the richer-colored Common Milkweed, but with the Swamp Milkweed the purple flowers are accompanied by narrower lance-shaped leaves.  This one wasn't quite ready to bloom, but they are a fairly showy flower when they do bloom. I suspect that they'd be popular with gardeners if not for a few issues: They're technically poisonous, though I suspect that unless you fall on one and somehow manage to swallow most of it, you won't be poisoned by it. (I'm kind of a spaz, but think this scenario is too clumsy for even me to worry about.) If you're allergic to latex (apparently some people are, since they ask me this every time I donate blood), the milky substance that oozes out when you break a stem or leaf is latex. This particular milkweed does like wet areas, and might not grow well without abundant water. They probably don't stay in bloom ...