July’s milkweed visitors. We encourage about two dozen milkweed plants in our garden for the beauty and fragrance of the flowers, but more because of this plant’s value to honeybees, butterflies, and many colorful beetles and bugs that depend on it for food and survival.

As the flowers open at the end of June, they lure large and small butterflies, honeybees, day-flying moths, insect predators and an occasional hummingbird. Tiny hummingbird moths, insects that mimic the ability of hummingbirds to hover and dart, also show up.

And we know that milkweed stems and leaves are indispensable to monarch butterflies—as sites to lay eggs, and as food for the caterpillars, which will starve to death if placed on other plant species.

But we know, too, that to esteem our milkweed as a staple of insect life is to swim against the tide. The beau ideal, promoted by American magazines and chemical companies, is for manicured, closely clipped yards and roadsides, where so-called “weeds”—be they milkweed or comely ox-eye daisies—are interlopers.

The continued decline of monarch butterfly populations—their reproduction tied to a beneficial plant that’s mindlessly mowed and sprayed—is a predictable result.