Milkweed Wonder

I walked through 30-plus acres of milkweed yesterday. The smell is delicious and joyful and hearty. Common milkweed is incredibly fragrant in the way lilac or jasmine is; desperate, but not overpowering... if that’s even possible? It’s a clean smell but it’s as heady as any exotic. As it heats up on a Vermont summer day, the smell floats like a veil down the side of the mountain and into my windows. I wonder why no one has ever made a perfume of it -- it must be considered inelegant because of its farm status?  Then again, I HATE perfume (not smells or essential oils... but smells with propellants and sickening carriers) because it gives me immediate ice pick headaches, so it’s fair to say I just haven’t done my milkweed perfume research. Many people trying to have a “yard” or grow hay for livestock often regard it as a baneful, willful weed. I think it projects a stealth but patient intelligence that makes me feel like someone’s got my back? I’m a weirdo but that’s accurate.

The Lung has many, many ecosystems within it but the milkweed fields are some of its heaviest hitters. Around 450 species of insects feed on milkweed, some exclusively. It’s partly toxic to humans and animals, but some insects live their entire lives on the plant. Birds regard it as toxic and often avoid eating insects that feed on it because some of those insects ingest and store toxic cardiac glycoside compounds that are in the plant to use as a defense. ( I want CARDIAC GLYCOSIDE compounds in MY skin for self defense! I’m actually jealous. I wish I could squirt it out of my fucking eyes!) 

The milkweed plant is queen of high summer here in The Lung; greener than green leaves dusted with glittery mica from the dry soil. It attracts its own jewelry of semiprecious insectoid stones -- the milkweed beetles’ shields in coral red, pocked with black specks -- always in twos, stuck together mating in mirror image. ; semi-translucent, iridescent green-gold mottled tortoise beetle river pearls; silk and velvet touches provided by crab spiders in every creamy art deco color scheme there is.

Then, of course, there is milkweed’s most popular colleague -- the monarch butterfly, one of the most highly visible indicator species of global ecological health. In many ways the monarch is the only thing milkweed is known for... maybe it’s just a little too plain next to its friends?

Then comes the Fall. 

The colors of summer wash away into grays and browns and the strong milkweed stems harden into lance poles. The leaves wither, and make way for pods the size of chicken eggs that resemble spiked medieval maces with a slight flocking of silvery stubble. When the moisture in the air is finally gone and the larch trees turn yellow, the pods split open and reveal a bundle of silvery-gold Jiffy Pop silk squeezing out of Valkyrien helmets of coppery seeds; armor scales radiating as perfectly as if Alphonse Mucha, the grubby lord high image-maker of the Art Nouveau movement himself had painted them on. 

Still, the scene that holds milkweed’s being in the “picture dictionary of my mind” is that of rural school children in the war year of 1944 meandering along down some dirt road on their way home from school, stopping here and there to pull the snagged, sultry floss from any milkweed plants they found. They would stuff them down into burlap onion sacks and hang them in drying sheds. They could make 20 cents a bag for dry floss. Rural school children ended up collecting several million pounds of milkweed to make, of all things, life jackets for the troops engaged in the fighting in the South Pacific. What a heart-breaking, evocative supply chain image; I think of all those tiny fingers weaving a wreath to throw a drowning man.