Hello, Old Friend

Moving to Tucson for the winter, we didn’t expect to know anyone except our grandson and his wife, but Tucson has surprised us with some old acquaintances and a surprising number of other Kansans.

I didn’t expect to encounter any familiar flora, either, and that proved to be the case. The landscape here seemed totally alien to me. Different trees, different shrubs, different smaller plants. Ocatillos fascinated me, as did the many kinds of cacti, especially the saguaro, whose dead bones are made into useful fences and shades.

Until last week, I hadn’t seen a single native that I recognized, but that changed when the plants were sitting in pots in the yard.

An ecologist planned the landscape for our front yard around native plants whose blooms would attract bees and butterflies, but some of the plants were downright ugly, such as this one.

A few days later I discovered a pod hanging from one of its branches, a pod I recognized.

That has to be a milkweed pod, I thought. I know milkweed pods well because eleven varieties of milkweed grow in our Kansas posture. Their pods are variations on a consistent theme: their pods burst open and release hundreds of tiny seeds with gossamer wings, seeds that float away like a troop of sky divers.

Butterfly Milkweed, Blooming

The green sticks I had hated were my old friend, asclepias, commonly called milkweed, adapted to a desert climate. It has only insignificant leaves that soon die. Photosynthesis occurs in the plant’s stems, which explains their green color. I’m not sure of the genus but it is either albicansor subulata. Both are native to this part of Arizona.

The Sonoran milkweeds are part of a chain of 156 varieties of asclepias that stretches across the United States. This chain is vital to survival of the monarch butterfly. Monarchs can feed only on the flowers’ nectar and can lay their eggs only on asclepiasbecause newly-hatched larvae can eat only milkweed leaves and live only on the plants until they become fat caterpillars and move away to form chrysalises. 

It’s very nice to see my old friend living in the Sonoran desert. He has changed, of course, as old friends tend to do, but I’d recognize him anywhere.Crop Circles

Copyright 2019 by Shirley Domer