Monarch on butterfly weed
Danaus plexippus
Monarch · Brooklyn Botanic Garden · 24 August 2025
A Monarch working the flat orange umbels of butterfly weed in the August border, a milkweed species without the sticky white sap the genus is best known for. Monarchs breed across the whole of North America on milkweeds, and butterfly weed, a plant of dry prairie and roadside, is one of the ones they take to most readily in a garden.
Still a full host plant for the caterpillars despite the lack of sap, and a garden-friendly one for exactly that reason. The roots were the pleurisy root of old American medicine, chewed for lung complaints, and the plant is toxic enough that the cure must have been worse than most of what it treated.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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