Air Date: Week of February 20, 2026

A female monarch butterfly feeds from a milkweed plant. (Photo: © Mark Seth Lender)

One of the most heavenly scents on Earth is that of milkweed in bloom, says Living on Earth’s Explorer-in-Residence Mark Seth Lender. But fewer and fewer monarch butterflies are showing up to feed and lay their eggs on this vital plant that gives them a powerful toxic defense against predators.

Transcript

CURWOOD: Monarch butterflies and the milkweed they depend on inspired this essay from Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender.

Under Milkweed
Monarch Butterfly
Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge
© 2026 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

LENDER: When milkweed is in bloom I love to be in the middle. “Weed” must have meant something else when our Celtic-Anglo-Saxon-Norse-French-Roman tongue acquired the name and named it, because milkweed is beautiful when it blooms. Compound blossoms. Carmine violet. Each flowerlet a cup of nectar the scent of ambrosia... Do not give in to the temptation, to eat of it, or drink of it. Milkweed can stop your beating heart. Maybe that’s why the nomenclature is what it is. Never mind. Milkweed is not there for us. Milkweed brings monarch butterflies. Who feed on the sweets and the poison too. That black-orange-yellow-fluttering-butterfly of a monarch’s wings tells bird, and beast alike, take a bite and it is me, who will finish, you!

Last year and the year before and for a number of years before that by the time the monarchs arrived milkweed had gone to seed. This year the same, all the monarchs too late. Except one. One monarch butterfly who came to the right place, for milkweed, in flower, just in time.

Spring is around the corner now. Nothing is certain. Maybe that one monarch will tell her friends. Maybe, I’ll just… help her out. Under milkweed, as milkweed blooms, at the top of my lungs “Heh! Monarch Butterflies! Over heeeere!”

One monarch butterfly is only magic. Two? A miracle. Which is exactly, what butterflies are about. And so is Life. And so are you.

 

Links

Mark Seth Lender’s Website