"What's that orange flower in your garden" is a question we hear at the front desk frequently at this time of year. The Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberousa) is in it's full glorious show. Often called pleurisy root, it is quite a showy milkweed and grows along sunny roadsides. It is a native American herb and is difficult to transplant because of the tuberous root. It sets milkweed pod type seeds infrequently and after quite a few years of maturity and so it is not as common a roadside plant as it once was in years gone by. The root is used as indicated by a common name, considered a remedy for children's pneumonia.
"What's that orange flower in your garden" is a question we hear at the front desk frequently at this time of year. The Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberousa) is in it's full glorious show. Often called pleurisy root, it is quite a showy milkweed and grows along sunny roadsides. It is a native American herb and is difficult to transplant because of the tuberous root. It sets milkweed pod type seeds infrequently and after quite a few years of maturity and so it is not as common a roadside plant as it once was in years gone by. The root is used as indicated by a common name, considered a remedy for children's pneumonia. 
This is one of my VERY favorite wildflowers - and I was fortunate enough to find a pot of it at a nursery a few years back, since yes, it's hard to transplant. Grown from seed in a pot, it happily made the transition to my garden and is blooming its heart out this year!
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