Common milkweed inspires fear and fancy
One night recently when my family and I were going for our usual after-dinner walk at the Leslie Street Spit, I decided to hang back to explore a field filled with fall flowers while my husband and daughter continued down the trail.
With sunset less than a halfhour away, I had the meadow mostly to myself, save for a few silent songbirds skittering through the bushes and some low-flying cormorants heading back to their roosts further out on the spit. Above me in the darkening sky were handfuls of cotton-candy pink contrails, the memory of recently passed jets.
Along with the gently swaying fronds of greying goldenrod, the meadow was full of white clover, chicory, yellow toadflax, asters, evening primrose and tansy, and chock-a-block with common milkweed plants, Asclepias syriaca, in various stages of going to seed.
Most of the milkweeds bore the warty, dirigible-shaped seed pods that appear on the plants toward the end of summer, long after their honey-sweet blossoms are gone. The pods were a rich chartreuse colour in the evening’s rose-gold light.
A closer look around the meadow revealed some milkweeds whose pods had matured enough to split open just a crack, providing a glimpse of the tightly packed brown seeds nestled within.
After descending a small hill and venturing more deeply into the field, I began to see milkweeds that were further along in the process of seed production. Their pods were no longer green but were a dessicated brown. They had already split open and burst, in a process called dehiscence, dispersing their precious freight of seeds to the wind.
The dried-out pods themselves had hardened into a material that looked like a cross between tree bark and the shell of a walnut, and brought to mind Wynken, Blynken and Nod, the three fishermen who sailed off one night in a sea of dew in a wooden shoe in the poem of the same name by Eugene Field.
Gazing at some of the pods that still had their silky seeds attached, I could also picture the softest, most comfortable bed in the world for a tired but lucky field mouse. Just looking at them made me want to lie down and drift away.
I’m not the only person to have had fanciful thoughts about milkweed seeds. There have been plenty of poems written about the humble plant, including this one by Wilhelmina Seegmiller, a Canadian-born author and teacher who wrote several books of poems for youngsters, including “Little Rhymes for Little Readers,” first published in 1903.
“As white as milk, As soft as silk,
And hundreds close together; They sail away
On an autumn day, When windy is the weather.” My personal favourite, though, is “Dainty Milkweed Babies,” a poem easy enough to find on the internet that is usually attributed to “author unknown.”
“Dainty milkweed babies, wrapped in cradles green,
Rocked by Mother Nature, fed by hands unseen.
Brown coats have the darlings, slips of milky white.
And wings — but that’s a secret — they’re folded out of sight.
The cradles grow so narrow, what will the babies do?
They’ll only grow the faster, and look up toward the blue.
And now they’ve found the secret, they’re flying through the air,
They’ve left the cradles empty — do milkweed babies care?”
It seems this cradle poem should rightly be attributed to Eleanor Smith, a groundbreaking American musician and teacher who composed two books entitled “Songs for Little Children,” “a collection of songs and games for kindergartens and primary schools.” The two volumes of easy-to-sing songs were published in 1887 and 1894.
In the decades that followed, “Dainty Milkweed Babies” was reprinted in primers as a way to introduce young children to the biology of plants and seed dispersal. That makes sense to me, as every milkweed plant — each a remarkable baby-making factory — carries within it a botany lesson, an invertebrate zoology lesson and countless ecology classes. It must have helped, too, that the plant is native to much of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, making it an easy subject for use in schools.
Of course, common milkweed — sometimes known as butterfly flower, silkweed, silky swallowwort and Virginia silkweed — is also common in Ontario, where it used to be on the province’s list of noxious weeds. It landed on the list because the milky latex in the leaves and stems of old plants contains toxins called cardenolides that can cause cardiac problems in humans, livestock and other animals. To prevent the accidental poisoning of grazing livestock, agriculture officials in many jurisdictions put milkweed on the noxious weed list and made farmers who had crop lands destroy it with herbicides.
Milkweed was removed from Ontario’s noxious weed list as of 2015, a good thing for our monarch butterflies.
To survive, monarchs must lay their eggs on milkweed leaves; the caterpillars that develop from these eggs can survive only by eating these particular leaves. The more milkweed plants there are, the more suitable hosts for monarchs there are.
As I was thinking about the changing fortunes of milkweed, my family returned from their walk. With the sun already over the horizon, it was time to go. I took a few last photos in the fading light and wondered where each of the flat, brown milkweed seeds — each with its own silken parachute — would fly.