Slow down and join the pollinators

Native wildflowers are a bike path bonus

by

Sports & Recreation

Last week I took an 18-mile bike ride. The Southwest Bike Path runs behind my house, so it’s easy to take that to the Capital City Trail, around the south side of Madison through Fitchburg, then back up along Monona Bay, then back to the Southwest Bike Path. As cyclists, we Dane County residents live with an embarrassment of riches.

It’s easy to put your nose down and ride, which is sometimes my way of getting in my miles. But last week it was my wife’s first ride after a hip replacement in April. We were going to take it slow, and we did.

The slower we went, the more I saw. Plants that were ignored by me at my usual 17.5 mph pace were suddenly visible at 12-13. When I stopped to take a closer look at what I thought were compass plants, they were actually cup plants. The pairs of leaves intersect and form a cup around the stem, providing a water source to birds and even frogs and salamanders. The yellow flowers are favorites of pollinators. There were quite a few of them along the trail to the west of Seminole Highway.

I wondered what else I was missing, and it was quite a bit.

Planting native prairie seed mixes was a part of the development plans of these recreational corridors. Friends groups, like Friends of Capital Springs and Friends of Starkweather Creek often add to and help maintain these plantings.

The Cap Trail runs through prairie, so most plants are prairie species. Of course, there are some non-natives and invasives, but the diversity is unexpected.

The common milkweed is, well, common along the trail. There are 12 species of milkweed in Wisconsin that are native, and in 2025, the Wisconsin DNR named the common milkweed the Species of the Year for its rare plant monitoring program. Common milkweed is not in any danger, but out of the 12 species native to Wisconsin, seven are listed as endangered, threatened, or of special concern. The more milkweed you can plant in your pollinator garden, the better off the monarch butterflies will be, as they’re losing habitat and need a place to lay their eggs.

All milkweeds contain a milky (shocker), sticky, poisonous sap that contains cardiac glycosides, toxins that don’t affect the monarch caterpillars that eat milkweed. It does make them unappetizing to predators. Don’t suck on a stalk, especially if you have cardiac issues. Actually, just don’t do it anyway; leave them to the monarchs.

It’s hard to go far without running into a patch of wild bergamot. Its pale purple flowers are delicate, and I never saw a bunch without crowds of pollinators. Bumblebees struggle a little because of the floppy petals, but they manage and work them hard. The reward must be worth it.

The biennial Indian plantain is small in its first year, but in year two, the plant leaps to a height of up to nine feet. The leaves are held somewhat close to the red, sturdy stems. It will continue to reseed itself and likes growing among the larger prairie grasses. There were signs of bluestem grasses, but they’re small and still growing.

Queen Anne’s Lace is common enough, and I always assumed it was invasive because there is so much of it along roadsides. It is indeed highly invasive, brought from Europe by some numbskull as an ornamental plant. It's also called wild carrot; you can smell the carrot-y smell if you stick your nose up to the flowers. Best not to handle it that much, as it has poison lookalikes like hemlock.

Fleabane has pretty little white flowers that look a lot like chamomile. They’re both in the Aster family, but if you squish this, it doesn’t smell sweet. It tends to fill in where other plants don't, and it’s an important early flowering plant for pollinators. Its name comes from the folk practice of drying the plants and mixing them in with mattress filling to discourage fleas.

There are so many more I haven’t mentioned, like glade mallow and joe-pye weed, Culver’s root and burdock. I can only recommend that you slow down and take a stroll along Madison’s bike trails. I haven’t even scratched the surface.