Chances are you won’t find native milkweeds at your neighborhood nursery. It’s not a showy plant and, right up front, it has weed in its name.
It’s catching on, though, as more gardeners and butterfly aficionados become concerned about the dwindling numbers of monarch butterflies. Monarchs need milkweed; the larvae eat only milkweed leaves.
Milkweed is way more than butterfly food, says Randy Johnson, a native-plant expert who collects milkweed and other native-plant seeds. “It’s a keystone,” he says. “There is so much going on around this plant.”
First, milkweeds (there are more than 100 species) nurture more than monarch butterflies. Worldwide, more than 300 species of butterflies, known as the milkweed butterflies, use the plants’ leaves as hosts on which to lay eggs and feed their larvae. In the United States, two species in addition to our native monarch — the queen and soldier — depend on milkweed plants for survival. Queens are frequently seen, says Dallas County butterfly farmer Dale Clark, but his soldier sightings are few.
In addition to supplying habitat and food, milkweed has a chemical, glycoside, that lingers in the mature butterflies as a defense mechanism. Predators are sickened by consuming these butterflies and quickly learn to leave them alone, Johnson says.
Those same glycosides are used in medicines, he adds, that help treat congestive heart failure and cardiac arrhythmia. “If we lose the milkweed, we are losing a plant that helps us.”
Milkweed is the poster child of native prairie plants for Johnson, who is horticulture director at the Dallas Zoo. It represents a number of disappearing species that are integral to the environment and to people.
Many of the wild prairies, he says, are being overtaken by development. When the prairies go, so do the native plants. So do the insects that feed on the plants, the birds that eat the insects and the chemicals that the plants produce. Plant diversity is replaced by fewer species that, in turn, support fewer other life forms.
This is Johnson’s deepest concern and favorite topic. He can talk for hours about milkweed and its fellow natives. He has hundreds of photos showing grasses, some in wide-open rural prairies, others growing on urban lots.
“My plants are grown from seed, local seed for the most part, whose genetics are right for where we live — our soil, climate, fauna,” Johnson says, “and that achieves two major things: It helps them to survive and it sustains ancient genetic lineage. I have to grow these plants to help perpetuate the genes that have evolved over time.”
He cultivates several milkweed varieties behind Ron’s Organic Dynamics, a garden center in Mesquite, with plans to sell them to local nurseries. “I started these milkweed plants because there was such a demand, and no one would step up and grow native milkweed,” Johnson says.
He also cultivates natives including vervain, an herb with pale violet flowers; false nettle, which hosts red admiral butterflies; golden Alexander with bright yellow flowers; native sedge, which Johnson considers a replacement for the suburban staple monkey grass; and the “king of grasses” known as big bluestem.
Johnson spends a lot of time walking through fields, looking for native plants. He fingers seed heads on tall grasses and pushes them aside to find the ground-hugging plants beneath them.
“I’ll take seeds from plants, even if I don’t know what it is,” he says. If they have survived here, he figures they are worth saving.
Like Johnson, Will McClatchey, research director at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas in Fort Worth, loves native plants. Other species are aliens, he says.
“Alien plants don’t have birds and insects that work with them. They deplete the soil,” he says. They also require more water and more care to thrive. Homeowners, and the general environment, would be better off with natives rather than aliens, he argues.
So far, native plants have been a hard sell with many homeowners, McClatchey says. To many they look like reedy weeds.
That’s changing. He says his institute has met with local big-box stores that carry plants to urge buyers to try selling native plants, too. The BRIT committee is meeting with South Texas growers who are willing to make native selections more available.
“This is a tide that is shifting fast,” McClatchey says.
Other regions, particularly those with worse droughts such as Las Vegas and Phoenix, already have moved to encouraging and using plants native to their locations.
Johnson says native plants can look just as pleasing as more traditional landscaping, but with less care, less watering and less soil amendments. Many flowering native plants also can provide greenery and three to four seasons of interest.
Milkweed can be a good start. It has a number of varieties, grows fast and is perennial. While its flowers might not be considered as showy as the ubiquitous begonias and impatiens, milkweed does flower. Blooms range from pale green and white to pink, purple and orange.
McClatchey urges gardeners to plant not only a variety of plants but a variety of milkweeds. Planting milkweed with other native plants is ideal, he says.
“I would never just plant a patch of milkweed. I’d plant other natives with it. That way you would have some color and some texture,” he says. “That’s how these plants are adapted in the wild.”
McClatchey admits that many homeowners are still getting used to the idea of replacing standard landscape shrubs and perennials with native plants. Some even pull them as weeds.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” McClatchey says. At his institute, “we kind of turn up our noses at roses and azaleas.”
Karel Holloway is a Terrell freelance writer.
Where to buy
Learn more about milkweed and other native plants from Randy Johnson at 10 a.m. Sept. 13 at Gecko Hardware, 10233 E. Northwest Highway, Dallas. The store promises to have plants and seeds for sale. geckohardware.com
Johnson cautions that he is still building up inventory, but he does have some milkweeds and other native flowers, shrubs and trees for sale. Contact him at firstname.lastname@example.org or facebook.com/pages/ Randy-Johnson-Organics /221012134600371
Independent nurseries continue to stock Mexican milkweed (Asclepias curassavica), but call before driving.