Don’t Forget
About the Rough:
Cultivating an endless fascination for PD’s flora & fauna
Cory says the common milkweed plant has three stages: before flowering; 
long-lasting summer flowering; and the warty-looking seed pod stage.
LOVE IT FOR:
✢ its wild and rangy nature, making it beneficial for colonizing 
large areas. A deciduous, native, herbaceous perennial 
wildflower, it grows on a stout, unbranched stem up to 6 
feet tall. 
✢ its 2- to 3-inch, domed umbel — think open umbrella — of 
5-petal, sweet-smelling pink to lavender flowers. See up to 
100 flowers per cluster and one to three clusters per stem.
✢ its built-in defense system. The thick, sticky, toxic white 
sap it produces when broken keeps insects and animals 
from eating it. Unfit for horses, dogs, and cats: The bark, 
flower, seed pods, leaves, roots and stems are poisonous! 
Can cause eye irritation and dermatitis in humans.
✢ feeding monarch caterpillars. Its clear, sugary, heavy, 
fragrant, safe-to-eat nectar attracts bees, butterflies like 
monarchs and swallowtails, fireflies, and diverse beneficial 
insects. 
✢ perpetuating the food chain as a larval host plant. Female 
monarch butterflies lay eggs exclusively on milkweed 
species because the caterpillars rely entirely on its large, 
broad, oval-to-oblong leaves for food. Ingesting the plant's 
toxins makes the caterpillars and butterflies unpalatable to 
predators.
✢ the large, teardrop-shaped seed pods that open in autumn 
to release wind-borne seeds attached to silky floss.
Prairie Dunes is recognized by Audubon International with its sanctuary 
certification for conservation of wildlife and natural resources. 
PD Golf Course Superintendent Cory Griess took the first and third photos of the milkweed plant — Asclepias,
Asclepias, named after 
Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of medicine — on holes #14 and #15, inside what he calls a “no chemical application area.”
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