Silverhill gardener Ann Nitteberg is a most gracious host to both visiting fellow gardeners and the fast-disappearing and much loved monarch butterfly. Ann is one of the blessed few who grow milkweed plants, which are the only plants on which the monarch will deposit her eggs and on which the larvae feed.

The extent of milkweed monarch habitat loss since 1996 has greatly increased. Plots of milkweed "way stations", like Ann's, provide the resources needed to produce new generations of monarchs and to sustain them during their migration across the United States. Extinction is not yet a possibility, but migration could decline to such a point that recovery could take many years.

Property owners and gardeners like Ann are doing what they can to shore up the population of one of the most widely recognized and beloved butterflies of North America.

Ann, who is happily retired in the "good, little community" of Silverhill, comes from a family of gardening lovers.

"My mom and dad and grandmother all loved to garden," Ann shares. "My mom had a patch of milkweed in her garden in Elsanor, and when she passed, I took some of those plants for my garden. The milkweed really attracts butterflies, as well as bees and hummingbirds."

With a laugh, Ann shares. "When I first bought them home, I noticed worms on the flowers and, not knowing any better, I carefully plucked each one off. Then someone told me how these plants are the food source for monarchs, so I left them alone after.”

Ann's lovely shaded patio is bordered with lush, thriving beds of the orange and yellow flowered milkweed, the graceful, tall cleomes, phlox and refreshing ferns, which all contribute to the welcoming way station for monarchs, as well as heat-weary visitors.

Milkweed plants are herbaceous perennials and are tall, thin summer bloomers that form globes atop the plants' rigid stem. The flowers come in varying shades of pink, yellow and orange. Before the flowers open, seed pods that resemble small cucumbers burst open in late summer to early fall, exposing the seeds which are easily distributed by the slightest wind.

"Milkweed is really considered a weed," Ann says, "and is not hard to grow at all. The seed pods are full of seeds and will bloom all over. I even have some plants sprouting up through my patio."

Milkweed's fame as a butterfly-attracting plant is certainly true. Monarch mamas deposit their eggs on these congenial hosts and, once the caterpillars emerge, they eat the plant's leaves. When the stem or leaves are bruised, a white, milk-like substance oozes out — thus the milkweed name. The leaves are poisonous to humans and pets-however, the monarch caterpillars ingest them and do not die. Instead, in Mother Nature's grand plan, the plant's toxins make the caterpillars poisonous to predators.

Ann spends the early morning hours of these hot summer days weeding and watering her garden with rainwater which she collects by the bucketful. She generously shares plants and seed pods with grateful fellow gardeners.

"After all," she says, "what are we gardeners here for if not to share with one another?"

From providing food and respite for a needy monarch population to educating and eagerly sharing plants and seeds with fellow gardeners, Ann Netteberg is a gracious host who gardens with aplomb and purpose in her shady Silverhill sanctuary.