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Asclepias meadii
Mead's milkweed is a rare, federally threatened perennial milkweed of the tallgrass prairie in the American Midwest. It is grown mainly for conservation, and it needs full sun, undisturbed prairie conditions and a long time to mature.
Asclepias meadii is a rare species of milkweed known by the common name Mead's milkweed. It is native to the American Midwest, where it was probably once quite widespread in the tallgrass prairie. Today much of the Midwest has been fragmented and claimed for agriculture, and the remaining prairie habitat is degraded.
The plant is a federally listed threatened species due to this destruction of its habitat. Factors contributing to its rarity include mowing and plowing, highway expansions, erosion, loss of a natural prairie fire regime, pesticides directly applied or drifting from nearby agricultural operations, invasive plant species, trampling by hikers and off-road vehicles, loss of native insect pollinators, deer herbivory, and predation by a number of insect species, including the non-native oleander aphid.
The only naturally occurring populations of the plant are located in Missouri and Illinois, and populations have been reintroduced to Indiana and Wisconsin, where the plant had been extirpated. There are also some populations in Kansas and Iowa, but few of these may last, especially in Kansas, where they occur on private hay fields that are mowed frequently.
Cartwheels · Whitestem milkweed · Spider milkweed · California milkweed · Heartleaf milkweed · Bloodflower · Curtiss' milkweed · Woollypod milkweed · Desert milkweed · Poke milkweed · Mexican whorled milkweed · Florida milkweed
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Asclepias meadii by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
