The restart of the milkweed industry in the 2010s felt like a first. It was nothing of the sort. Long before coats and mittens, American silk had clothed, stuffed and healed generations, from Indigenous nations to European drawing rooms. It carried a false name for three centuries, intrigued kings and swindlers alike, then sank into oblivion, while monarch caterpillars kept it warm. Here is the long memory of a weed.
A plant with a thousand uses
Long before the French arrived, the Indigenous peoples of North America already knew milkweed and used nearly every part of it. In the St. Lawrence Valley, the Wendat made cordage from it and material for clothing, and they were the ones who taught the first French settlers to boil the young pods, otherwise toxic, to eat them. Elsewhere, the fibre of the stems, harvested in the fall once the plant had dried, yielded the same sturdy cordage: the Menominee made rope, sewing thread and fishing line from it, the Meskwaki thread, and the Cherokee bowstrings.
At the table, the plant demanded caution, since raw it is toxic. Boiled, however, its young shoots, flower buds and young pods fed many nations. The Haudenosaunee ate them in spring, the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) used them to thicken soups, "like okra," the Meskwaki dried them for winter, and the Omaha, Pawnee and Ponca of the Missouri Valley prepared them like asparagus.
The pharmacopoeia was not left out. The plant's white latex was used to remove warts, by the Cherokee as well as the Haudenosaunee, who also applied it to stings and cuts. Closer to home, in the St. Lawrence Valley, botanist Jacques Rousseau recorded in 1945 the uses of the Kanien'kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke: the floss of the pods as a poultice on ailing parts of the body, and a root infusion used by women.
All of this knowledge concerns the plant. Further south, it is through the butterfly that people know it. In the highlands of central Mexico, where monarchs spend the winter clustered on oyamel firs, the Purépecha and Mazahua see in their return, around the Day of the Dead, the souls of the departed coming back for a night. The link between milkweed and the monarch, though, is woven further north, on the breeding grounds where the caterpillar feeds on nothing else.
"Of Syria": the story of a mix-up
For a long time, milkweed carried a traveller's name without ever having travelled. In 1635, the Parisian physician and botanist Jacques-Philippe Cornut illustrated and described it in his Canadensium Plantarum aliarumque nondum editarum Historia, considered the very first botanical treatise devoted to the flora of North America. A delicious detail: Cornut never set foot in America. He worked from plants brought back from Canada and grown in the Parisian gardens of the Robin and Morin families. BAnQ, Québec's national library, also notes that he was not the first to report this "plant with silky fibres": Jacques Cartier and Marc Lescarbot had mentioned it before him, in vaguer terms.
The trouble is that Cornut thought he recognized in this Canadian plant a dogbane from the Levant that had already been described, and saddled it with the epithet "syriacum." A century later, in 1753, Linnaeus repeated the error without correcting it and carved it into the Latin name for good: Asclepias syriaca, "milkweed of Syria." The plant is North American through and through, but the mix-up has stuck to it ever since. As for the French name "soyer," it came later, from naturalist Charles-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt, who introduced it to France as a textile plant and devoted an entire treatise to it around 1810. From "syriaca" to "soyer," the plant has never stopped causing confusion.
A "froth like cotton"
The French settlers soon took an interest. In 1640, the governor of New France, Charles Huault de Montmagny, sent the Ursulines of Québec a "certain froth that is like cotton," with an instruction reported by Marie de l'Incarnation: beat it or card it "to see whether it could be spun," because it was "finer than silk and than beaver." In all likelihood, this was milkweed floss, already being put to the question that has followed it ever since: can it be spun? In 1640, as for a long time afterward, the answer was disappointing.
American silk, the European fashion
In the 18th century, Europe fell for this light, lustrous plant wadding. According to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, stockings and gloves were made from it in Naples, along with fabrics that required little suppleness; elsewhere, the floss filled cushions, comforters and hats, as a substitute for down and feathers. On paper, the dream was superb: a silk that grows by the roadside, free and abundant.
Reality pushed back. Milkweed fibre is short, smooth and hollow, and the very qualities that make it so warm make it almost impossible to spin on its own: it slips, it does not catch. To get a strong thread from it, it has to be blended with cotton or wool, and the result often falls short of the promises. Three centuries before our workshops, the same tension was already there: a marvellous material, and terribly hard to tame.
Rouvière, the king's hosier
The great French promoter of American silk was a Parisian hosier, Jacques de la Rouvière, who made the wardrobe of Louis XV. Won over by this fibre from Canada, he obtained a formal privilege from the king: a decree of the Council of State, signed at Versailles on October 4, 1757, authorized him to make and sell fabrics from "a material he discovered, called houette or thistle." He even devoted an essay to it in 1770, and the naturalist Sonnini an entire treatise in 1810. It is said that Louis XV himself wore it, though no contemporary source confirms this.
The venture, however, may have turned sour. Around 1760, Rouvière is said to have launched a fabric called "la soyeuse," before finding himself, according to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in court: his cloth allegedly contained not a shred of milkweed. The fibre, too short and too smooth to spin on its own, would have been blended with something else, or replaced outright. With no archive to pin it down, the episode remains hearsay, passed from one compilation to the next.
It nonetheless has a familiar ring. Three centuries later, the temptation is the same: sell the prestige of milkweed while slipping only a pinch of it into the product, just enough to print the word on the label. Rouvière's "soyeuse" may not have contained a single strand; some pieces sold today contain little more than a handful. The plant, for its part, has never rewarded those who coveted its name without its substance.
Forgotten after the Conquest
Then the thread snapped. After the British Conquest of 1760, the Empire was awash in cheap silk and cotton; milkweed, finicky to spin and costly to process, fell back to the rank of weed. Its cultivation was abandoned, its uses forgotten. For nearly two centuries, without anyone paying attention, the plant would serve only to feed the caterpillars of the monarch butterfly, which lays its eggs on nothing else. It is a curious legacy: the weed that humans abandoned quietly became the cradle of one of the continent's greatest travellers.
A thread that never really broke
What this story reminds us is that milkweed was never just a weed. Three centuries before our mittens, it was already clothing people, already healing, already intriguing, and already resisting those who wanted to tame it. At Lasclay, we are picking up this old thread with new tools and the same conviction: this plant deserves better than oblivion, and better than a mere name on a label. This time, its return also benefits the monarch butterfly, which never let go of it.
This post is part of a series on the history of milkweed. Also read: the history of the milkweed industry in Québec, the chapter on milkweed during the Second World War, and the technical feature on harvesting milkweed.
