09/02/2026
🦋🐝🌺 Meet a few of our friends from the garden!
Our gardens aren’t just beautiful—they’re alive with activity. Monarch butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds move from bloom to bloom, finding food and shelter while helping create a thriving little ecosystem right here on the farm. 🌿
And one plant beautifully brings together two things we love: pollinators and herbal medicine.
🦋🌿 Butterfly W**d (Asclepias tuberosa), also known to herbalists as Pleurisy Root, belongs to the milkweed genus—and the monarchs love it!
Adult monarchs and other pollinators visit its brilliant orange flowers for nectar, while milkweeds have an especially important relationship with monarchs: they are the host plants monarch caterpillars depend on for food.
But herbalists have a relationship with this plant, too. 💚
The root of Asclepias tuberosa has a long history of use in North American herbal traditions, particularly for respiratory support—which is where the common name Pleurisy Root comes from.
🐝 The bees find nectar and pollen among the garden blooms.
🌺 The hummingbirds visit nectar-rich flowers and can carry pollen from flower to flower.
🦋 The monarchs find nectar, habitat, and the milkweed plants so important to their life cycle.
🌿 And the herbalist sees plants with generations of traditional knowledge and uses behind them.
That’s one of our favorite things about an herbal garden. We aren't the only ones who benefit from it.
To the monarch, it can be food and habitat.
To the herbalist, traditional medicine.
To the pollinator, nourishment.
To us all, beauty and biodiversity. 💛
One garden. So many relationships. 🌿🦋🐝
**d
