Asclepias syriacaL.

common milkweed

WFO wfo-0000551803 Accepted WFO 2026-06 7 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–g

Asclepias syriaca, photographed by webohms
fig. a webohms, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-13 / obs. 205770756
Asclepias syriaca, photographed by Violet T.
fig. b Violet T., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205848299
Asclepias syriaca, photographed by Jack Forrester
fig. c Jack Forrester, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205847722
Asclepias syriaca, photographed by Mark Apgar
fig. d Mark Apgar, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205221922
Asclepias syriaca, photographed by aerospaceeb
fig. e aerospaceeb, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205153986
Asclepias syriaca, photographed by Mark Apgar
fig. f Mark Apgar, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205222367
Asclepias syriaca, photographed by Mark Apgar
fig. g Mark Apgar, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205222819

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 8,731 observations

Peak flowering in Jun, from 8,731 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 18 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Asclepias apocinum Gaterau
  • Asclepias capitellata Raf.
  • Asclepias consanguinea Kunze
  • Asclepias cornuti Decne.
  • Asclepias fragrans Raf.
  • Asclepias globosa Stokes
  • Asclepias grandifolia Bertol.
  • Asclepias illinoensis Michx. ex Steud.
  • Asclepias intermedia Vail
  • Asclepias obtusifolia Kunze
  • Asclepias pubescens Moench
  • Asclepias pubigera Dumort.
  • Asclepias serica Raf.
  • Asclepias syriaca f. inermis J.R.Churchill
  • Asclepias syriaca f. leucantha Dore
  • Asclepias syriaca f. polyphylla B.Boivin
  • Asclepias syriaca f. syriaca
  • Asclepias syriaca var. syriaca

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.