At Sycamore Canyon School in Newbury Park, students planted a milkweed garden four years ago to provide food and shelter for both the adult butterflies and the caterpillars.

Both the milkweed tussock and the monarch caterpillars eat the cardiac glycoside-laden milky sap of milkweed and have evolved mechanisms to retain those toxins in their bodies after metamorphosing ...

Milkweed is considered an essential food source for adult monarchs, and it is also the one and only type of plant that the caterpillars can feed from. ... and shelter for them.

A monarch caterpillar munches on milkweed in the kitchen of Kay MacNeil’s home in Frankfort. “Monarchs must have milkweed to survive. If you don’t grow it, they won’t come,” she said.

Both the milkweed tussock and the monarch caterpillars eat the cardiac glycoside-laden milky sap of milkweed and have evolved mechanisms to retain those toxins in their bodies after metamorphosing ...

Milkweed, Hone said, is the monarch’s host plant here in the northeast U.S. and is the primary source of food for its caterpillars. Black swallow wort is a distant cousin of the sand vine, which ...

Their caterpillars exclusively eat the leaves of a native wildflower called milkweed and the amount of it growing in North America has plummeted. In the state of Illinois alone, milkweed numbers ...

Because milkweed has been decimated, it can be hard to find, so you’ll want to know where to get milkweed and how to grow it before you bring home your first monarch caterpillar.