My One Great Weed

There is one lone milkweed plant that comes up in my front yard every year.

To the average suburbanite, it looks like a weed and sticks out like a sore thumb in the midst of the low shrubbery that surrounds it.

Every year I leave it alone, knowing that it is the only plant that can host monarch butterflies and hoping that they will choose my plant to make new life.

Historically, this weed gets more action than many other plants in the yard.

The bunnies munch from the bottom and the deer de-foliate the top of the plant.  Thanks to the deer, it has never made it to the flowering stage.  And it has never hosted any butterfly larvae.

Yesterday I was taking a break and sitting in the sun on the front porch when I was pondering my poor pathetic milkweed stalk.  It only had a few leaves left and those were half-eaten and didn't look very healthy...

Half eaten!!  Wait a minute...that means...

Finally, after years of leaving the weed to grow, I found three monarch caterpillars hiding under the few tattered leaves that the deer had left behind.   A meager meal but a meal nonetheless.

Striped, vibrant and very busy...

Who would have thought that this poor, bedraggled plant would still look like home to an egg-bearing female butterfly.  Yet she saw possibility.  Or maybe she was just desperate.

The lesson isn't lost on me...

We can make a lot from a little.

And from the smallest, humblest, least-foliated of beginnings can come great things.

Fingers crossed that they move onto the next stage before the food runs out...