Monarchs and Milkweed

Op-Ed, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune

Near my back door is a tall, straggly plant with dull, nearly colorless flowers. After a heavy rain, the stalks collapse against each other. It’s a mess. If you saw it you’d think it was a weed, and you’d be right. I planted it.

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Gardens are about beauty, and that’s how I choose my plants. I hope they’ll thrive. I hope they’ll bloom. I hope they won’t be shredded by insects.
Insects are a big presence in my garden, since I don’t use toxic chemicals. Each year it’s a race to see which comes first, the end of summer or the end of the garden. I’m tempted, of course, by chemicals. If beauty is the goal, chemicals seem the quickest way to reach it: a quick misting and the aphids are gone; a morning’s dousing and the brick walk is weed-free.
I don’t use them, though.
I’m not a chemist, and can’t follow the science, but I’m uneasy about their smooth eradicatory sweep. There’s nothing smooth and absolute about nature, which works in messy ebbs and flows. And I wonder about people who worked the soil before us - the wheat farmers of Sicily, breadbasket of the Roman Empire. How did they manage? Now it seems you can hardly grow a blade of grass without chemical assistance, but historically, people produced bounteous harvests without help from Ortho.
In my garden, (and many others), plants thrive without chemicals. They do fine on sun, water, compost and attention, as they have since the first human planted the first yam. Synthetic chemicals are new: it’s only about fifty years since they’ve been widely used by backyard gardeners like me. Now they’re everywhere. The labels look cheery but carry ominous small-print warnings: no-one knows their long-term consequences. On summer evenings children used to run alongside the DDT truck, letting its cool spray coat their arms and legs.
My English roses were attacked every year by small green defoliating caterpillars. I sprayed with Bt, or bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring organism that attacks the digestive tracts of caterpillars. It doesn’t affect vertebrates and it breaks down without a trace. It took care of those caterpillars within minutes. If beauty is the end, Bt seemed a safe, easy means of reaching it.

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I hope my homely back-door plant will thrive, but not that the insects will leave it alone. I want it ripped to shreds, big holes in the foliage, weighed down by visiting insects.
The homely plant is is asclepius syriaca, the common milkweed, and the destructive visitor I hope for is Danaus plexippus, the gorgeous monarch butterfly.
The monarch, with its ember-colored, black-edged wings, may be the most beautiful of all butterflies; certainly it’s the most famous. The Latin name refers to the ancient king Danaus, who is known for a long journey: so is the monarch.
Every fall, all monarchs in the Northern Hemisphere travel over a thousand miles. The West Coast monarchs head for Monterey, California, and the East Coast butterflies – including those by my back door in Maine – fly to central Mexico. No-one knows how they survive the vagaries of high-altitude travel, the buffeting thumps of airplane traffic, El Nino.
Most monarchs live for about six weeks. The single butterfly you think you see all summer may actually represent several generations. The last, hatching in the fall, is called Methuselah, and survives from six to nine months – long enough to reach the winter retreat and spend the season. No-one knows how the Methuselahs find it, since they’ve never been there.
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Milkweeds, the asclepias family, are essential to monarchs. The butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed. The eggs hatch into larvae - caterpillars – which eat the leaves; the caterpillar forms a chrysalis from which the butterfly emerges. Every monarch on the planet depends on the presence of milkweed.
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I have two asclepia varieties: syriaca, the common one, and incarnata, prettier, more refined. Every morning I find an amber monarch near them. Brilliant, fire-colored, it alights, wings pulsing slowly, in, out. On the leaves are bright striped caterpillars, soft and plump, eating their way to splendor.

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You used to see milkweed everywhere – ditches, fields, the backs of buildings, along parking lots – anywhere no one was looking. In the fall, milkweed produces a thick brown pod, tightly packed with seeds. Each has a filmy, fibrous kite to catch the wind. You see them seldom now.
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We no longer tolerate milkweed. It produces a disagreeable substance called cardenolide alkaloid. Monarchs absorb this, which protects them from bird predation. Cardenolide alkaloids can be toxic to cattle, though, so cattle farmers dislike milkweed. Crop growers dislike it because it’s a weed. The traditional means of eliminating weeds is through tilling, which is probably what the Sicilian wheat-growers did. Tilling eliminates most weeds, though some always survived. Until now, it wasn’t possible to eradicate a plant altogether.
Most of monarch/milkweed habitat occurs in farmland, which is vanishing at nearly 3,000 acres a day. Most of the remaining habitat is owned by agribusiness, which increasingly grows corn and soybeans, our big commercial crops, from genetically modified (GM) seed. The GM crops can resist glyphosphate, which is the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUp. Milkweed cannot: the GM switch has caused the loss of 80 million acres of monarch habitat. Roadside milkweeds, too, are being sprayed into extinction by our towns. Backyard gardeners are in on this – anyone who uses herbicides to tidy up. Even organic gardeners, like me – remember those tiny caterpillars, and the Bt?
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The monarch and the milkweed will soon disappear. The decisions affecting this are economic, and everyone knows that economics come before beauty. Everyone knows that commerce comes before conservation. Everyone knows that anything legally available is safe for the next generation.
Or maybe everyone doesn’t know this. Maybe the idea of nature – its messy ebbs and flows, its annual race between plant and insect, its unchartable complexity - is valuable, too. Maybe we’re not sure that whole species should be eradicated because of economic decisions made by a few big companies. Companies last rarely more than fifty years; monarchs and milkweeds, more than fifty thousand. Maybe we’re not certain that genetically modified crops should take over, playing an unknown role in our children’s health.
We can write letters, sign petitions, send money. We can quit using herbicides, take a stand on GM crops. We can plant milkweed, and, for awhile, until the habitat is too diminished to support the population, monarchs will appear. These tawny, airborne jewels will drift across our yards, landing dreamily on our plants as though this place were the only one in the world they want to be.
Which it is.