Welsh's milkweed, Ascleias welshii seed

$10.00

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Asclepias welshii - Welsh's milkweed 1 seed

There are a limited number of seeds.

Each seed is $10. 

White Showy Milkweed, Asclepias Speciosa Alba Seeds

$6.00

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Disclaimer: White Showy Milkweed seeds are collected from plants with white flowers. No promise and no guarantee is made that plants grown from White Showy Milkweed seeds will have white flowers.

White Showy Milkweed, Asclepias Speciosa Alba seeds. Half gram or about 55 seeds per packet. 

Chasing My White Whale: The Tail Of White Showy Milkweed

White flowers in a sea of traditionally un-white milkweeds. Flower color of showy milkweed certainly varies from plant to plant. The pink bloom is sometimes pinker then pink. Other showy milkweed may appear pale pink. Over the summer an individual flower can intensify it’s color then fade. Open pollination produces delightful flower colors. One flower color is white. White is very rare. 

White is not rare to find in the milkweed family. I’ll list a handful of milkweeds that have white in their flowers: asclepias perennis, asclepias angustifolia, asclepias texana, asclepias variegata, asclepias verticillata, asclepias subverticillata, asclepias fascicularis, asclepias linaria, asclepias pumila, asclepias ovalifolia. What is rare is when a normally colorful flower blooms without the colorful pigment.

Settling into my new city requires that I stretch my legs. Salt Lake City is as urban as most cities of it’s size. Thankfully the flora in the parks and park strips are excellent and improving. Biking around town is manageable but has its risks. Bike lanes are hit and miss. The Trax light rail makes it easy to leap frog to different urban islands in the valley. 

Welcoming me to Salt Lake City was a text linking me to a White Showy Milkweed flower. http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/85162439 Two weeks since the text and the flowers had faded. I pedaled to Fairmont Park on August 5th 2021. Small pods were growing, the flowers had wilted. I tied to identify the White Showy Milkweed among all the pink plants. Impossible task. The seed collection will be attempted again next year - 2022. 

Mid July 2022 and it’s Pom-Pom Paradise in the milkweed patch at Fairmont Park. The White Showy Milkweed stems are marked. All I need to do is return to harvest the seeds. Seed collection occurs in early September. It’s too late in the year to start growing this years seed. The next phase of the project is to grow the White Showy Milkweed. 

2023 has been a good year growing milkweed. Of the 500 milkweed stems grown in 2023 five were from the White Showy Milkweed seeds. Two have died but three persisted and have been planted into the landscape. These new plants will take time to flower. If all goes well I hope to see flowers in July of 2024. Will they be White Showy Milkweed? Time will tell. A second and more precise seed collection was done in 2023. The White Showy Milkweed stems were marked with zip ties on June 28th and seeds from the marked stems were harvested on September 1st 2023.