Asclepias welshii

Asclepias welshii is a rare species of milkweed known by the common name Welsh's milkweed. It is native to southern Utah and northern Arizona, where there are four known occurrences remaining. Most of the plants occur in Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, where the habitat has been degraded in many areas by off-road vehicle use. It is a federally listed threatened species of the United States. This is an erect perennial herb growing up to a meter tall. It is "a rather handsome milkweed" which "is a very distinctive species with no obvious close relatives," according to Holmgren and Holmgren, who described the plant in 1979. It grows from a sturdy rhizome system that anchors it in the unstable sands of its native dune habitat, with several aboveground stems arising from one rhizome system. For this reason, it is not possible to get an accurate count of how many individual plants actually exist, since several widely spaced stems may actually belong to one plant; estimates of the number of......read more on Wikipedia.