Rob's plants home garden plants wildlife seed photos plant sale journal topics fun links guestbook Asclepias curassavica

 

The species has red-and-yellow bicolor flowers

'Silky Gold' Common name tropical milkweed; bloodflower Family asclepiadaceae Life cycle tender perennial Flowers red, yellow Size 2-3' Light sun From seed germinate warm detailed seed-starting info below Seed ripens late August A tender member of the milkweed family. We'd grown these years ago, but had fallen back upon their hardier cousins until this year. Spurred in part by their colorful flowers, and in part by their superior attractiveness to monarch butterflies, I decided to give them another try. I think they'll turn into a staple of our annual garden - not only are the flowers even nicer than I remembered, they successfully attracted a monarch mommy - we found their caterpillars by early August. The one pictured here is a little one, not nearly ready to pupate.

Late October - most of the flowers have gone to banana-shaped seed pods, but a few keep on providing their cheerful color well into fall

In our garden, this plant grows in the following areas: cutting garden, back yard island

Seed for this plant is included on my seed trade list

About my plant portraits

Seed-starting details for this plant

2006. Seed from '05 trade. 'Silky Gold' baggy 70F (27d) - 75F (100%G, 2d); 'Red' baggy 70F (21d; 40%G, 4-17d) - 75F (25%G, 3-5d)
2007. Seed from '06 garden. Baggy 75F (91%G, 6-11d)
2008. Seed from '07 garden. Baggy 75F (95%G, 5d)

I welcome comments about my web pages; feel free to use the form below to leave feedback about this particular page. For the benefit of other visitors to these pages, I will list any relevant comments you leave, and if appropriate, I will update my page to correct mis-information. Faced with an ever-increasing onslaught of spam, I'm forced to discard any comments including html markups. Please submit your comment as plain text. If you have a comment about the website as a whole, please leave it in my guestbook. If you have a question that needs a personal response, please e-mail me.

home

garden

plants

wildlife

seed

plant sale

topics

guestbook

journal

links

Last modified: March 13, 2008
Contact me