Each summer our cow pasture in rural Alexandria would fill with both, rendering huge swaths untouchable to our pair of milk cows, one of whom always seemed to be named "Bonnie."
Joe Hiebel would come over on his orange Allis Chalmers with its sickle bar attachment to whack off the tops of the thistles, giving the grass a chance to fill in the gaps and the cows an opportunity to graze.
The milkweed was another story.
A hated childhood chore was pulling this sticky nuisance up by its evil root. The plant has a single, white tap root so pulling it up was easy enough, but the plant was so prolific it could take hours of bending to yank them, leaving thousands wilting in the the sun. We tried to get them all before they could blossom, but no matter, they always seemed to return in full force the next year.
What we did not know at the time was that the milkweed is the preferred, if not only, host for the monarch butterfly larva.
We know that now, and with the disappearance of the once-ubiquitous monarch butterfly, the former milkweed picker has been given a new chore.
Yesterday his wife brought home a small packet of seeds and he soon found himself carefully sowing and watering a future milkweed patch in a natural area at the edge of the lawn.
It was a bit hard to take it all in.
