Popular common name:
Common milkweed
Botanical Nomenclature:
Asclepias syriaca
Pollinator Magnet: Common milkweed is renowned for attracting a wide variety of pollinators, including bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Its fragrant flowers provide a vital food source, helping to support local ecosystems and promote biodiversity in your garden.
Support for Wildlife: As a native plant, common milkweed serves as a critical host for various butterfly species, particularly monarch butterflies, which rely on it for laying their eggs and feeding their larvae. By growing this plant, you’re actively participating in conservation efforts for these important pollinators.
Low Maintenance and Resilient: This hardy perennial is easy to grow, thriving in diverse soil types and requiring minimal care once established. Its drought tolerance makes it well-suited for a variety of garden settings, allowing you to enjoy its beauty without the hassle of constant upkeep.
Unique Attributes of
Asclepias syriaca
1 Flower Color
Purple, Pink
2 Plant Height
5-8 feet
3 USDA Zones
5-11
4 Bloom Timing
June, July, August
5 Light Preference
Full Sun, Part Sun
6 Soil Moisture
Low, Medium, Wet
7 Soil Substraite
Adaptable
8 Ecoregion I/II
9 Soil Moisture
Low, Medium, Wet
10 Difficulty Rank
🟢 Easy
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Little Monarchs
by Jonathan Case
A ten-year-old girl may be the only person who can save humanity from extinction in this exciting graphic novel adventure.
It’s been fifty years since a sun shift wiped out nearly all mammal life across the earth.
Towns and cities are abandoned relics, autonomous machines maintain roadways, and the world is slowly being reclaimed by nature. Isolated pockets of survivors keep to themselves in underground sites, hiding from the lethal sunlight by day and coming above ground at night.
10-year-old Elvie and her caretaker, Flora, a biologist, are the only two humans who can survive during daylight because Flora made an incredible discovery – a way to make an antidote to sun sickness using the scales from monarch butterfly wings. Unfortunately, it can only be made in small quantities and has a short shelf life.
Free to travel during the day, Elvie and Flora follow monarchs as they migrate across the former Western United States, constantly making new medicine for themselves while trying to find a way to make a vaccine they can share with everyone. Will they discover a way to go from a treatment to a cure and preserve what remains of humanity, or will their efforts be thwarted by disaster and the very people they are trying to save?
Little Monarchs is a new kind of graphic novel adventure—one that invites readers to take an intimate look at the natural world and the secrets hidden within. Elvie and Flora’s adventures take place in real locations marked panel-by-panel with coordinates and a compass heading. Curious readers can follow their travel routes and see the same landscapes—whether it be a secluded butterfly grove on the California coast or a hot-springs in the high desert. Through both comic narrative and journal entries, readers learn the basics of star navigation, how to tie useful knots, and other survival skills applicable in the natural world.
Creator Jonathan Case acquired the fact-based portion of Little Monarchs through intensive research and several expeditions to study monarchs across the western United States. Scientific support also came from the Xerces Society, the world leaders in monarch preservation.