Asclepias

A clump-forming native milkweed with bright orange summer flowers, strong pollinator value, and tolerance for dry sunny sites.

A native, colony-forming milkweed for sunny pollinator meadows, monarch habitat, and larger naturalized areas.

A more refined garden-behaved cousin of common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) - same monarch host status and ecological value, but clumping rather than aggressively spreading, well-suited to rain gardens and consistently moist sites. Pink fragrant flower clusters from mid-summer through early fall; 2005 NC Wildflower of the Year. NC State tags Poisonous (cardiac glycosides) - the same toxicity that makes monarch caterpillars unpalatable to vertebrate predators.

Whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata) is the slenderest and most drought-tolerant of the common native milkweeds, a fine-textured perennial of prairies, glades, and dry open ground across most of central and eastern North America. It grows 12 to 24 inches tall on wiry unbranched stems clothed in narrow, needle-like leaves set in whorls, and carries small umbels of greenish-white flowers from midsummer into early fall, later than most milkweeds. Like all Asclepias it is a monarch host plant, and its late nectar feeds bees and butterflies when little else is flowering. It wants full sun and lean, dry soil, and it is tougher and less bulky than common milkweed, though it spreads by rhizome and can form a wandering colony on good ground. All parts are toxic, and whorled milkweed is one of the more poisonous milkweeds to grazing livestock, so keep it out of pastures and hayfields.