Missouri is home to a wide variety of milkweeds that spread their blooms over the warm months. The purple milkweed blooming along the roads and in the edges of the woods is the first of the milkweed parade.
No Milkweeds Means No Monarchs
This is what the Missouri Conservation Department keeps saying. And it is true as milkweeds are the only plants their caterpillars feed on.
Those milkweeds are fewer in number every year as the places where they grow are plowed under, sprayed and mowed. They have no modern economic value, so they are destroyed with little thought for the consequences.
Valuable Milkweeds
Although the big push to grow milkweeds is for the monarchs, there are other reasons too. An easy dozen kinds of insects visit the flowers.
Purple milkweed blooming is a magnet. Frittilary butterflies were tromping around drinking nectar. Dodging their feet were wasps, bumblebees and bees. Another visitor is the clearwing hawkmoth that hovers like an hummingbird.
Flower or crab spiders ambush prey on the flowers. Various beetles move in. The plants attract aphids and milkweed bugs.
Perennials
Because milkweeds are perennials, they are great for erosion control. Some are very showy like the popular butterfly weed. Others need lots of space like the common milkweed that spreads into a patch. Most like lots of sun.
A huge patch of purple milkweed blooming is gorgeous. The clouds of orange, brown, yellow, white, purple, black and more butterflies shifting between the upright umbels add to the beauty.
Growing Places
I see purple milkweed blooming in places with some shade and moisture. The common milkweed does well in road ditches, sometimes reaching six feet fall or more. Butterfly weed likes it drier and sunnier. It is rarely over two feet tall. Water gardens or the edges of ponds and lakes is favored by pink swamp milkweed.
Green, whorled and spider milkweeds are easy to grow too. They like dry and sunny places.
Butterfly gardens need milkweeds.