Oliver Hernandez’s front yard hums with plenty of bugs for the 12-year-old and his friends to find. “It’s kind of fun just knowing that there are lots of caterpillars in the yard,” he said. About a third of the yard looks like a teeny swath of prairie, with wild indigo, bee balm and, until recently, a key plant for monarch butterflies: common milkweed. Last fall, the city of Overland Park told Oliver’s mother to rip the milkweed out of her pollinator garden. That bummed Oliver because it’s a plant where brightly striped yellow, black and white caterpillars would appear each summer, grow fat on leaves and transform into the feather-light marvels of nature most famous for what they do next. … Across the U.S., milkweed bans are disappearing. But this Kansas suburb and plenty of other towns and cities across the Midwest continue to define it in their city codes as flora non-grata. Sometimes city, county and state rules conflict, leaving homeowners to navigate mixed messages from local governments that can’t see eye-to-eye on whether to promote milkweed or kill it off.
Source: KAKE – News
