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What's blooming in your back yard?
By Cynthia B. Coleman • Staff Writer
 | | In sunny, open areas where the soil is moist, you will find the striking and fragrant Swamp Milkweed, which is a deeper shade of purplish pink than its sister, the Common Milkweed and much showier. However, both are quite fragrant with a lovely sweet, but not overpowering, scent. Where there is lush vegetation, you will catch a sweet-smelling whiff of the flower more often than before spotting it. (Recorder photo by Cynthia B. Coleman) |
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What do you think of when you hear the name, milkweed - breaking open a stem to watch the sticky "milk" drip out or, in the fall, collecting the dried seed pods to make seasonal crafts? Perhaps you think about butterflies, especially Monarchs. But would you ever spy the plant and think of a Greek god?
Someone did. And that someone named the family of milkweeds (with more than 140 species), Asclepius, after the Greek god of healing. That person was Carolus Linnaeus from Sweden who, in the 1700s, established the system of classifying or organizing the two "kingdoms" plants and animals and a third kingdom for minerals.
The milkweed pictured here is the Swamp Milkweed. Its botanical name is Asclepias incarnata L. The "L" stands for Linnaeus who named the genus, the botanical ranking above the family group. Because botanical names are in Latin or Greek, they are always written in italics.
The species name, incarnata, means flesh-colored, referring to the flower's color and comes from the Latin word incarnare, which means "to make flesh." The name of the carnation flower also comes from this Latin root referring to the color of flesh or the color of the body's soft tissue.
This swamp milkweed was found close by Lake Moomaw; this species of the milkweed family grows in wetland areas and is known to be a wetland indicator; that is, where it grows, water will be found.
For centuries, even millennia, the milkweed has been used for food or medicine, even though it holds a milky sap, which contains alkaloids and can be toxic. Because of its toxic nature, Monarch butterfly larvae feed exclusively on milkweeds in North America and because of that, this butterfly is not a tasty meal for its predators, who have learned to spot the black and yellow colors and markings and stay clear of them. In fact, other butterflies have adapted to imitate the look of the Monarch to fool those who would eat them, misleading them into thinking they also are bitter tasting when they are not.
The milkweed's nectar, while very fragrant to the human nose, is an important source of food for bees and other insects who feed off the sweet liquid. In gathering pollen, the milkweed has a gland, or pollen sac, designed to snag an insect's leg. The milkweed's pollen sticks together as a granular mass and is held in a structure that looks like an upside down V.
When an insect crawls across the blossom, its legs slip between these glands. When it jerks its leg back up, the insect pulls up the whole sticky V-shaped mass of pollen grains, only to fly off to another flower. When it lands on the next one, its legs slips in again, and again is jerked back up, leaving behind the first pollen batch. The insect continues to crawl across the flower head seeking its nectar until its legs are full of pollen and the process continues.
In late summer or early fall, the flower head forms a pod, which is woody and leathery and a joy to many children, young and old. Inside the pods are soft, white filaments known as silk or floss. Break open a pod and the silk is like fairy down, filling the sky with little white parachutes carrying the milkweed seeds below, allowing the wind to carry the seed off to create more fragrant flowers the following summer for people and insects alike to enjoy.
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