Butterfly Weed
Asclepias tuberosa
A bright orange native milkweed that blooms all summer, feeding butterflies, bees and hummingbirds, with leaves that feed monarch caterpillars. It thrives in poor, dry, sunny ground, and deer pass it by. It's slow to settle and hates being moved, so plant it for keeps, in soil that never stays wet.
- Mature size
- 2 × 1.5 ft
- 0.6 × 0.4 m, tall × wide
- Hardiness
- Zones 3a–9b
- USDA
- Sun
- Full sun
- Water
- Dry to moist
- Blooms
- Jun–Aug
Butterfly Weed at its mature size
A mature Butterfly Weed grows 1 to 2.5 feet tall and 1 to 1.5 feet wide.
Drawn to scale beside a 5 ft 9 in person. With VeraScape, you see it at this size in your own yard.
Typical mature size, unpruned. Sources: Missouri Botanical Garden.
Through the year
What Butterfly Weed looks like month by month in a typical zone 6–7 garden.
Below ground · Nov–Apr
Dies back to the ground; emerges late.
In leaf · May
Upright clustered stems of narrow green leaves, no flowers.
In flower · Jun–Aug
Flat-topped clusters of bright orange flowers on every stem.
Fruit · Sep–Oct
Spindle-shaped upright seed pods, some split with silky floss, foliage yellow-green.
Photos
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Growing Butterfly Weed
- Grows well in
- The Northeast, the Southeast, the Midwest, and the Plains and Mountain West.
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Good for
- Drought tolerant, deer resistant, and pollinators
- Leaves
- Dies back in winter
- Native to
- Eastern and Southern United States
Spacing
VeraScape spaces plants so their grown canopies just touch. For Butterfly Weed, that’s about 1.5 ft apart, center to center.
Place a row in your own yard and VeraScape spaces them at their mature width, so you can see whether they’ll crowd the walk.
See Butterfly Weed in your yard before you dig
Visualize it at its true size, alongside the rest of your design.
Other milkweeds
Butterfly Weed
Swamp MilkweedAll drawn to the same scale.