I'll go ahead and post this on the Texas Gardening forum. If anyone has input, please provide it there, with my sincere thanks.

Maybe an aster of some sort? Doesn't look like any milkweed I know of. Could be goldenrod?

Martha

Interesting, oksandy48 -- someone on the TX forum also mentioned ironweed. However, ironweed flowers seem to cluster at the ends of stalks and aren't feather-like.

Likely not an aster, Martha, from the pictures I saw. Asters tend to be bushy, and this my plant (IIRC) was tall and slender/stalky. Goldenrod is very likely! The flower plumage has the right shape (at least this TX variety), and I can see how the leaves resemble a MW's:

Disheartening is coming across words/phrases such as 'invasive' and 'keep this out of your garden'. I'd really hoped I could add another type of milkweed to my butterfly garden arsenal. :)

Thanks again....at least when the plant blooms, my son can report back.

These are definitely goldenrod

Thanks for confirming, Stephen. I'd half expected sprouts all over my yard when the tiny seeds blew about, but haven't seen any signs. And as easily as these grow, from my reading, I found it odd (but gratefully so!) that the tray of seeds I tried germinating showed no signs of life after a couple of weeks.

I've got plenty of milkweed and pollinators in my garden now to keep me (and the butterflies and bees) plenty happy for this summer.

Not to look providence in the mouth (free plants), but the best bet on milkweeds is to purchase them (either plants or seeds (if you are good at seed propagation, because milkweeds require a few specialized techniques, as a general rule)).

Thanks for your input, dbarron. A couple of very generous GWers were giving away seeds (curassavica and incarnata) a couple of years ago, so those have gotten a good start. (That said, I was raising 19 monarch caterpillars earlier this spring and couldn't keep up with their appetite -- ended up having to purchase four more curassavica's at the local nursery, and found taking cuttings from those is much easier/faster than starting from seed.)

I did recently purchase A. speciosa and A. syriaca seeds online for a terrific price, and have read these two varieties require cold stratification. If I can't stop my impatient ol' self, I'll toss a few into the fridge (moist paper towel in baggie method) for a few weeks and see if I can't germinate some for later this summer. My biggest challenge may be discerning between the two types of seeds.

I've had generally bad luck with the transition from a growing season old milkweed (ie germinated in spring and grown well in a pot), to planting in early/mid fall in the garden. Generally those species require more like 90 days stratification, which is why I usually winter sow and let Nature do the stratification.

A thing of note is many/most milkweeds are tap rooted and resent disturbance to the point of death, especially if you break the taproot when transplanting. Thus I transplant at the earliest possible opportunity (at the appearance of the first true leaves) and the plants have almost all transplanted well. However, delicateness of touch and deftness of replanting tiny seedlings is a mastered art. That being said, I still lost scads of speciosa, perennis, and variegata when transplanting to the ground in Sept/Oct. I don't know if it was abrupt cold snap (we had that) or too much moisture in winter.

Do you find the speciosa grows okay in the South, dbarron? (I'm just outside of Houston.) I tried putting the incarnata seeds through a two- to three-month cold stratification for two springs, and none germinated. This spring, I got frustrated and just tossed a few into yogurt cups, then set them outside. They sprouted....the unpredictability that is Mother Nature!

I personally haven't seen speciosa in the wild south of NW Arkansas, but I think that's because as things get hot and humid it gets going, it's more of a western native...and we're on the eastern fringe of it's range....that may make it a challenge.

Syriaca on the other hand seems to be everywhere, but I can't get it to grow to save my life. My current yard is swamplike in late winter/spring and then possibly habitable by milkweeds other than incarnata (which I have) the rest of the time. So...I have tried to play tricks and plant milkweeds where it's drier, but no far no luck here.

At my previous residence in Oklahoma, I had purpurascens, tuberosa, incarnata (6 - 7 foot in pond verge under some river birch), asperula, quadrifolia, and viridis. And I've seen most of them thrive in what was a sandy but quite wet soil (exuding bubbling water in spring/early summer). I think the key was it was dry in winter.

Sheesh...I may have to start a spreadsheet for my milkweeds. ;)

Made a trip to Austin this weekend and was able to snap a few quick picks (sorry, short on time and it was blisteringly hot/sunny when I took these). Oddly, by mid-June none of these is blooming at all. They're bushy and stand about 2-1/2' tall:

Are we still thinking goldenrod? Just idle curiosity at this point.

Definitely goldenrod