Have you heard about Honeyvine?
If you are like us, summer is a powerful lesson in questioning your garden goals. Spring brought exuberant growth and the promise of another bountiful season, and then summer brought the oppressive heat. Come August, we move more slowly and reassess our greenspace priorities.
Now it is officially fall, and the priorities shift yet again. With an eye for the harvest, we jealously pluck the fruits and nuts that took all season to grow, storing them safely away in our pantries and seed collections.
Honeyvine Milkweed is still here, twining around some of our shrubs and trees, floating on top like a green cloud of heart-shaped leaves and fat, tear-drop shaped seed pods, making it very easy to identify.
Those pods mean milkweed, pure and simple!
So, if you’ve been wanting to help us identify and promote Honeyvine, this is a great time to step up! Take a walk in your neighborhood and look for these green pods. Make a note of where you find them because if they are growing on a vine, those vines are Honeyvine!
If they are in your yard, please leave the vines growing wherever you don’t mind having a Honeyvine. Despite a reputation for being aggressive, Honeyvine is a well-behaved vine that does not emerge until mid- or late May and does not pull down or break branches on woody species. It can overcome herbaceous growth, so you may want to pull it in those areas.
We let it come in and grow over most plants, honestly, and we find it provides a second round of blooms when the hardy hibiscus is done for the season, for example. What harm can it do to a perennial plant that is done blooming, anyway?
And we would LOVE to have the seed pods you find, but DON’T PICK THEM YET! They aren’t ready until they are dry and brown. Just make a note of where you see them, and check back in a couple of weeks to one month. They should dry and even pop open to show the mature, well-formed brown seeds with fluffy white tails.
On a dry, sunny day, when those pods have browned up sufficiently, pop them into a paper grocery bag, and shoot us an email at amelia@pilgrimcenterinc.org to arrange drop off/pick up. Working with our partner, Keystone Native Nurseries, we will propagate plants to give away next season!
This guide works for all types of milkweed seed pods, and we gladly accept any type of milkweed seed, not just honeyvine. Please note: always ask before you pull or pluck anything in someone else’s garden space.
And on the subject of garden and lawn aesthetics, we know that the growing season is a weekly–if not daily–battle of beating the lawn into submission, and we all have succumbed, at times, to the societal pressure to maintain a perfectly smooth, uninterrupted turf of lush, green grass around our homes.
But achieving that HOA-approved lawn is not cheap OR easy, requiring weekly mowing and trimming, fertilizers to promote growth, insecticides to kill root-eating grubs, and herbicides to kill broadleaf “weeds”. Broadleaf plants are a turf grass lover’s sworn enemy, INCLUDING milkweeds, the host plants for Monarch Butterflies. In the fight to save these miraculous creatures from extinction, we are facing a fundamental choice.
We must decide what we truly value: turf grass or broadleaf plants? An orderly landscape or butterflies? Happy neighbors or HOA citations? Insect collapse or flowers? At the Pilgrim Center for Connection, we choose flowers. We choose butterflies. We Choose Love. And this year, we are inviting you to join us!
Choose Love: Choose Laeve
One summer day 8 years ago, I had an eye-opening experience. In the midst of my hectic life as a working mother of four, I stepped out the back door of my house to find weeds growing. Frustrated that I had let them take over, I reached down and began to angrily yank them out. As I grasped them, though, I felt something soft and giving. I had a handful of caterpillars!
I knew enough then to recognize that they might be Monarchs, but I also knew that they only ate milkweed, so I didn’t understand why they were on this darn “honeysuckle” vine I had to keep pulling out! I had always seen it growing as a weed, in every yard we had, on the edge of the woods, in the bushes, etc., since I was a child. Blooms in tiny white clusters, smells delightful, makes fluffy seed pods. Wait a minute.
Now I had a problem: I was emotionally invested. These helpless caterpillars NEEDED that plant I had been pulling up, Honeyvine Milkweed (Cynachum laeve). I had Monarch caterpillars but no milkweed! Where could I even find more?? That experience led my whole family to search the neighborhood for more Honeyvine.
We found enough for those particular caterpillars, but we realized first-hand what experts were shouting from Monarch Watch and Save Our Monarchs: decades of noxious weed ordinances vilifying milkweeds, as well as the proliferation of suburban HOA lawn aesthetics, have created a serious problem. And without more milkweed plants, we will lose the Monarch Butterflies.
Despite global recognition of this issue, whenever I share what I’ve learned about Honeyvine milkweed, I find it malingered and maligned in nearly every forum. I even find people in MY gardens in MY yards pulling it out WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.
These often are well-meaning folks who have some gardening education or experience. They may be planting a milkweed variety in their yard already, with intentions to support the Monarchs! And like many, they may also see their milkweed plants struggle or even die out. They find the Honeyvine milkweed uninvited in their grass and flowerbeds, over and over, every year, and they are frustrated by its tenacity and persistence.
They have no idea that they are pulling a monarch host plant. In fact, they believe it to be a fast-growing, aggressive, vining plant that will overcome and pull down their other, intentional garden plants. This feeling is understandable when we recognize the societal pressure to maintain turf grass and its preferred near neighbor, tidily mulched flower beds full of short bedding plants that bloom all year.
After years of observation, however, we feel it is more likely that Honeyvine is being confused with one or more of at least four other aggressive vining species common in this area: Climbing False Buckwheat (Fallopia scandens), Sweet Clematis (Clematis terniflora), Field Bindweed, (Convolvulus arvensis) and Morning Glory (Ipomoea spp.)
What if we are right? What if Honeyvine could be invited into and allowed to remain in our yards? What if, in the spirit of Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park movement, we stopped spraying 40 million acres of turf grass with broadleaf herbicides? Yes, it’s 40 million acres! That’s no drop in the bucket; that is life or death for pollinators.
How much more habitat could we create for our Monarch Butterflies and all pollinators? How many more people could experience the joy of watching Monarch caterpillars feed and thrive and metamorphose into those regal butterflies? How much more stewardship of our green spaces could be fostered and grown? How many more people would Choose Love if they only knew it would make a real difference?!
Calling all Citizen Scientists!
These are questions worth answering. But first, we're going to need to gather some data, and we’re going to need YOUR help!
And here's how easy it is: you don't have to start any seeds, you don't have to plant any plants, you don't have to pull any weeds, you don't have to have a garden, you don't even have to water a potted plant!
Just take walks, in your yard and in your neighborhood. Notice the plants that are coming up around you. The best part about Honeyvine is that this native LOVES to grow in our area. In fact, it lives in many of our yards and green spaces already, even if we've never planted or noticed it.
Here are some pictures of what it can look like at various stages of growth. It has heart-shaped leaves, likes to climb, blooms with clusters of small white flowers, and forms smooth seed pods that mature to release flat brown seeds with fluffy white tails that catch the breeze for easy dispersal.
Your assignment: help us locate Honeyvine plants so we can track their growth habits. Visit us at one of our events to grab a FREE, weatherproof Choose Love: Milkweed Growing Here sign (or just snag the image below and make your own!). Then get outside to discover this vine already growing in your yard or green common areas (school gardens, parks, etc). Place your sign and post your location with a photograph to Facebook or Instagram and tag us at @pilgrimcenterkc
We’ll confirm your plant identification and map your site. Then we encourage you to visit your Honeyvine several times over the season, and share photographs with us. As we are able on public and private sites, we will visit to monitor it over the next three growing seasons.
We’ll note details like, when do the vines first emerge in spring? How long do they get? Do they grow rapidly, spread vigorously, pull down other plants? When does it first bloom? How many seed pods form? We’ll also document observations of any Monarch butterflies and their eggs, larvae, chrysalises, etc.
Don't forget to have a conversation with landowners before placing signs. This can be an opportunity to encourage them to provide an area of their lawn or garden that supports pollinators with flowering plants or a water source.
Need a Honeyvine sign but can’t make it to a gathering? Fill out this form, and we’ll get you a sign.
Want us to come talk to your student group or visit our gardens to talk about pollinator support? Fill out this form. (coming soon)
We will gladly accept data submitted from anywhere in the United States, but we can only visit sites to collect information in the Kansas City area.
Please call, text, or email Amelia McDaniel at (816) 753-6719 or amelia@pilgrimcenterinc.org with any questions