Plant · P-136

Common Milkweed

Asclepias syriaca

Common Milkweed is the sole food source for monarch butterfly caterpillars, and its flowers also draw native bees and honey bees. Every part of the plant carries cardiac glycosides potent enough to kill livestock - dried hay is far more dangerous than standing pasture, since drying removes the bitter taste that normally keeps animals away while leaving the toxin behind. Despite that, cooked flower buds, young shoots and young pods are eaten as vegetables once boiled in changed water, and the plant also yields a strong bast fiber, a water-repelling seed floss that works as an oil-spill sorbent, and latex that can be worked into rubber.