Milkweed, the common name of the genus Asclepias, is an incredibly popular and diverse native plant that grows across the United States, from the Northeast to the Great Lakes to the Southwest. If you ...

Where Should You Plant Milkweed? Butterfly gardeners know the importance of milkweed. This plant family is vital to the survival of monarch butterflies, since it’s the only host plant their ...

What exactly is a “weed?” From a gardener’s point of view, a weed is simply a plant growing where you don’t want it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American poet and philosopher who lived from 1803-82, said ...

Milkweed, Asclepias species, attracts butterflies to your garden. It also attracts other insects that you may not want. My milkweed plants, Asclepias fascicularis, were covered with aphids this summer ...

Oliver Hernandez, of Overland, Kansas, poses with a common milkweed plant in his front yard in 2020. A tiny, young monarch caterpillar and even tinier monarch eggs are visible on the underside of a ...

Monarchs, as caterpillars, prefer the leaves of milkweed. Milkweed produces glycoside toxins to deter animals from eating them, monarch have evolved immunity to these toxins. When they feed, monarch ...

Q: My milkweed has orange bugs on its seed pods. Are they harmful? No, they’re not going to damage the plant enough to warrant intervention. These are native insects, and they are part of the ...

All of us were taught in our elementary school science class about monarch butterflies and their caterpillar stage that only eats milkweed leaves. Other insects also eat milkweeds, but they are hardly ...

From sago palms to milkweed, there are toxic plants all around us. But they're not all monsters. Here's how to live with them ...