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Asclepias californica Greene California milkweed
This milkweed variety is found mostly in central and southern California, where it is native. Identification. Plants are up to 3' (91 cm) in size, upright or reclining, with distinctively fuzzy stems and leaves. The leaves have wrinkly edges and a grayish-white fuzzy or woolly appearance. The buds appear pink, opening into deep red/purple flowers about 1" (2.5 cm) across. A yellow-green pentagon-shaped stamen (actually five fused stamens) is in the center of each flower. Edibility. A Wikipedia article suggests that this milkweed is edible: This plant was eaten as candy by the Kawaiisu tribes of indigenous California; the milky sap within the leaves is flavorful and chewy when cooked.[1] However, the sap mentioned above as a sort of candy contains cardiac glycosides in most other milkweed species, and monarch butterfly larvae eat the plants to make themselves poisonous to predators, so eating the sap in any form is potentially dangerous. Online References:
The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Plants for a Future, a resource and information centre for edible and otherwise useful plants The Natural History of Orange County, California SEINet—the Southwest Environmental Information Network
Asclepias californica description by Thomas H. Kent, last updated 25 May 2020.
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5/3/2007 · Death Valley Area · By Rhonda Tatiana Schorer Range:
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