LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM
SO MUCH FOR MILKWEED
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
The intensely sweet scent of milkweed saturates the air in early July. The
rich fragrance flows through open windows. Heavy sweetness permeates my
thoughts as I pick chard in the garden or hang clothes on the line near a
particularly large patch where seeds flying on their silk hairs in autumns
past established individual plants. Their growth has expanded into a clonal
gathering on systems of roots and rhizomes that spreads yards long. I
breathe deeply because I love this particular summer aroma.
The flurry of life in large patches of milkweed invites close and frequent
visits. The flower clusters, with their raspberry sherbet color, contain as
many as fifty or more flowers, and each flower has five pink pointed cups.
The insects attracted to the sweet nectar find pollination a tricky
business. At times, I find so much activity around the plants that I keep a
little notebook handy to jot down the visitors I see. Bees, flies, moths,
and butterflies maneuver on the slippery surface of the smooth little flower
cups to get a firm purchase before sipping nectar. An insect’s leg often
slips into slits between individual cups and becomes caught in the hinge of
two filaments that hold tiny pollen bags on each end. As the insect
struggles free after taking its fill, the saddlebaglike apparatus clings to
its leg and is transported to another flower where it may wedge and remain
in another slit between flower cups to provide fertilizing pollen when the
insect breaks free and flies away. The process is complex and few flowers
per plant are fertilized. Yet each developing pod contains many seeds.
Thoreau counted 270 in one milkweed pod. Occasionally an insect cannot free
its leg from the filament clamp and starves. I notice a bee struggling to
free herself from a slit as I examine a purple flower cluster. I wedge my
pencil tip into the tiny space, and the bee wings off.
Other insects are busy on the milkweed plants. Tiny iridescent jewel flies,
some orange, some green, and some yellow in front and green in the rear, flit
about the leaves. A crab spider, splayed on the underside of a leaf close to
the stem, waits for an inattentive insect visitor to the area. Leafhoppers
the color of chicory flowers suck sap from milkweed stems and leaf veins. A
pair of fritillary butterflies flit across the tops of milkweed plants. I
watch for the red milkweed beetle. I’m worried that the deep frost and weeks
of subzero temperatures with no insulating snow cover that we experienced
this past winter may have killed the beetles lying just under the surface of
the ground in their pupal cases. The milkweed leaf beetle, which eats the
colonies of aphids on milkweed, is absent also. These beetles, that
resemble large ladybugs, overwinter as adults in the leaf litter of the
gardens and woods. Did the hard deep frost kill them? Both of these red and
black colored beetle species have interesting strategies as they eat the
alkaloid-laden leaves of milkweed. Scientists have observed that these
beetles cut the main leaf veins of the milkweed plant where they are feeding
and thus drop the pneumatic pressure of the latex sap to leaf cells,
allowing the insects to dine on the edges of leaves that contain less
toxicity. Their milkweed diet still loads their systems with unpalatable
bitterness to repel predators, and their colors advertise this.
The monarch butterflies and the large milkweed bugs have not arrived. My
observations of monarch butterfly numbers are lower in recent years, and,
although the adult milkweed bugs do not travel as far as the monarchs do to
winter, they have some distance to travel from their winter havens to the
south. The butterflies and the bugs wear the warning red and black colors
that the beetles do. The large milkweed bug has sucking rather than chewing
mouthparts and lives on the juices of flower buds, flowers, and seeds as
they develop. Females lay egg clusters on the undersides of milkweed leaves,
and I hope to watch the nymphal stages of the young bugs as they develop
into adults. The monarchs lay single eggs on the undersides of the milkweed
leaves, and, as soon as the tiny caterpillars are visible, I watch their
progress and sometimes raise one in a jar with milkweed leaves to see it
form its chrysalis and, in time, emerge as an adult monarch.
In the damp coolness of July mornings before sunup, I find a variety of
insects not visible in the heat of the day. A mosquito sips nectar from a
milkweed flower cup. She moves about but is too small to be caught in a
flower slit. Another mosquito flies close. Perhaps it is a male of her
species. Scientists think that because mosquitoes lack sexual pheromones to
attract mates, they swarm at the food sources of their species to mate. A
moth, nectaring in the night, is caught in a flower slit; another hangs on a
spider thread. Many moth species, white and gray, fly about in the quickly
brightening morning. Tiny midges with feathery antennae swarm, nectar, and
mate, and a small black ant thrusts her head into a pink flower cup.
Milkweed contains, as its sweet smell and the bustle of nectaring insects
suggests, high levels of dextrose. Frances Densmore in her treatise on the
Chippewa people, How Indians Use Wild Plants for Food, Medicine & Crafts,
wrote, “the flowers [of common milkweed] were cut up and stewed, being eaten
like preserves…before a feast, so that a man could consume more food.”
French Canadians used the nectar of milkweed flowers to make a kind of brown
sugar by gathering dew-laden flowers in the morning, boiling them to produce
syrup, then processing this result to sugar in much the way maple syrup
becomes maple sugar.
Euell Gibbons in Stalking the Wild Asparagus, writes about milkweed
as food. Young shoots, four to six inches tall, that appear in early May,
as well as the small unopened flower buds and the newly forming seed pods
later in the growing season, when cooked in boiling water, drained and
reprocessed three more times in a similar way before cooking for ten minutes
at a boil, lose all bitterness from the plant’s white alkaloid sap and,
according to Gibbons, have an enjoyable, delicate flavor. Many summers ago, I
cooked some flower buds and found their taste pleasant enough with a good
dollop of butter and a shake or two of salt. However, too many garden
veggies are at hand when milkweed provides tender plant parts, and I have
not experimented beyond the flower buds.
Asclepias syriaca, the common milkweed, was named by Linnaeus when he
found the plant in the garden of a Syrian doctor. He mistook it as a native
plant of the Near East when in fact it was introduced from North America
many years earlier. The medicinal values of the plant are many, and Linnaeus
chose well, giving the plant the name of the Greek god of medicine,
Asclepius. Milkweed root, gathered and dried in the fall, has medical value,
acting as a diuretic and an expectorant and relieving joint pain among other
remedies. The white latex juice of the plant is offered as a sure way to
remove warts and moles. The latex sap, which oozes and seals wounds to the
plant, has interesting if limited uses. It congeals into a sort of glue.
Native Americans dried the sap and used it as chewing gum. I have read that
campers use it as a kind of emergency sealant to repair small tears in air
mattresses, but experimental research on the use of milkweed as a possible
rubber substitute in World War II proved too impractical a process to
continue.
My neighbor who cuts the meadow grass for hay considers milkweed a pesky
plant, and our gardens must be weeded of sprouting milkweed shoots all
summer long. Yet, in World War II, farmers were given milkweed seed and paid
to raise it for the production of the plant’s silk. Each of the
approximately nine hundred hairs attached to each seed is hollow and coated
with a waterproof wax. Scientists discovered milkweed silk was a useful
replacement for kapok, ordinarily used for flotation garments that was
unavailable from sources in the East Indies, cut off by wartime shipping
restrictions. Two or three pounds of milkweed silk packed into a life vest
could keep a man afloat for three days. Over the duration of the war, tons
of milkweed silk was processed into flotation equipment in a factory in
Petoskey, Michigan. I gathered milkweed seedpods with my classmates from
vacant lots in our city neighborhood in the early 1940s to fill long burlap
bags suspended outside the school office windows.
Henry David Thoreau, in his treatise, The Dispersion of Seeds,
(published in 1997 by Island Press as Faith in a Seed), noted that
the milkweed silk was called “le Cotonier” in Canada and that “the poor
collect [its down] and fill their beds, especially their children’s, with it
instead of feathers.” Thoreau’s wonderful observations about milkweed silk
in this work contain some of his most beautiful and inspiring writing.
“Returning one afternoon…I perceive in the little open meadow on Clematis
brook that the follicles of the Asclepias cornuti now point upward
and are already bursting. When I release some seeds, the fine silky threads
fly apart at once, opening with a spring—and then ray their relics out into
a hemispherical form, each thread freeing itself from its neighbor, and all
reflecting prismatic tints. These seeds are besides furnished with broad,
thin margins or wings, which plainly keep them steady and prevent their
whirling round. I let one go, and it rises slowly and uncertainly at first,
now driven this way, then that, by invisible currents, and I fear it will
make shipwreck against the neighboring wood. But no; as it approaches it, it
surely rises above it, and then feeling the strong north wind, it is borne
off rapidly in the opposite direction…ever rising higher and higher, and
tossing and heaved about with every fluctuation of the air, till at fifty
rods off and one hundred feet above the earth, steering south—I lose sight
of it. ”
Such a combination of the ethereal and the robust in this successful plant
brings zest to my little corner of Maine, but the best attribute of common
milkweed for me is the connection between scent and memory. When milkweed
blooms, my mind slips away to days of carefree play, wild berry picking, my
mother’s blueberry pie, great gulps of Zarex to cool the hike to the pond,
reading on the porch glider on hot afternoons—all that was and remains
simple and fine in summer.
