Common Milkweed

Description:

The lovely pale mauve balls of flowers on tall milkweed with large round leaves caught my eye. Ethnobotanic: People have used milkweed for fiber, food, and medicine all over the United States and southern Canada.

Habitat:

This plant grows throughout the Great Plains ecoregion from southern Canada south to NE Oklahoma, NW Georgia, and Texas, and east from North Carolina to Maine. Common milkweed grows in sandy, clayey, or rocky calcareous soils. It occurs along the banks or flood plains of lakes, ponds, and waterways, in prairies, forest margins, roadsides, and waste places.

Notes:

Spotted growing near the parking lot on Goats Island of Niagara Falls State Park (NY)