Common Milkweed.Asclepias Cornuti.
Found in meadows and roadsides, from June to August.
The large, round, and tough-fibred stalk, which grows from 3 to 4 feet high, has a sticky and milky juice, is minutely downy, and pale green.
The leaf is often very large (from 4 to 8 inches long), oval, rounded at both ends, with an entire and somewhat wavy margin, and a large midrib; it is thick in texture, smooth above, but a little downy beneath, and grayish-green in color, the underside being silvery,—the wide midrib is light, or often tinged with dull red.
The flower is rather large; the crown is brownish-pink, the lobes light flesh-pink or pale lilac, and the foot-stems are pinkish. The flower-clusters are large, round, and drooping; they spring from the angles of the upper leaves.
Though regarded as a “weed” this Milkweed has many attractive features.
The seed-pods of the Milkweeds are most interesting; rough on the outside, they are beautifully finished within, with a fine, smooth, light lining. The silky plumes of the flat-brown seeds are closely folded together and the seeds lie overlapping like the scales of a fish. The light green outside of the Butterfly-Weed pod, tinged with crimson-tawny, becomes with age a fine tree-trunk gray. In some varieties a likeness to a dove may be found in the inverted pod.