Tall, green milkweed ready for monarch butterflies if mowers and weedeaters stay away till fall

Please click on image to enlarge photo of Aspen Ridge/Hill Place milkweed growing through gravel from its old root in rich soil buried below. This view is from the old east-west railroad embankment that is to become "treeless trail." The species appears most likely to be either Asclepias viridis (spider milkweed) or Asclepias syriaca (common millkweed) or Asclepias virdiflora (green milkweed). Anyone who can tell BEFORE they bloom is urged to take a look in person and share the accurate identification by commenting on this Web log. There is no guarantee that these plants will be around long enough to bloom.



Monarch Watch Web site offers links to information on other butterfly species' requirements for survival
The Indian Trail (to be so-named because it intersects the old Trail of Tears in this area) would have been a shady walk with a great variety of wildflowers already there if it hadn't been denuded in 2005 and cut down to a lower grade for most of its length to accommodate the Aspen Ridge developers. I truly believe the Appian architects and engineers might have retained that trail almost in its pre-Aspen Ridge state had they gotten the Aspen Ridge project four years ago. Maybe they'll protect these milkweeds for the monarch butterflies' caterpillars and protect selected other species of plants on the area as long as possible for other species to use.
Many of the other "weeds" complained about by a few neighbors at the Town Branch/Ward One meeting Thursday are also native plants valuable to birds and butterflies and other wildlife. It is sad to think that many people destroy important plant species that various butterflies and other things MUST HAVE TO REPRODUCE in their yards and then wonder where the butterflies and bees and birds have gone. The definition of "weed" is a plant that someone doesn't want on his property. Few plants are "weeds" to wildlife. Even the hated Japanese honeysuckle and invasive non-native thistle species are valued by butterflies and bees and birds.
Learn to identify native thistles, protect them and remove only the nonnative invasive species
A couple of men (no doubt hired by the people trying to get Hill Place project approved by the Fayetteville City Council this Tuesday), mowed and used weedeaters to take down vegetation between this spot and Martin Luther King Boulevard (nee W. Sixth Street) on Saturday morning, no doubt in order to appease a few of the neighbors.
But most neighbors are concerned about the potential flooding of the area, and the thin vegetative cover of especially hardy and determined plants on the land is the only thing reducing erosion on the property right now. The storm drains and detention/retention ponds aren't doing the job and the silt fences are either over-ridden by fill dirt or victims of erosion below and not protecting the Beaver Lake watershed.