I have rooted tropical milkweed easily by just putting it in water. Have seen roots usually within a week. I am not sure if this helps.

You could bring a milkweed leaf indoors, one with an egg. I will put the leaf in a small cup with a bit of water in the bottom, to keep the leaf hydrated. If its a monarch egg, it will hatch in 3 or 4 days. First instar monarch cats are pretty tiny. You might have to hand rear the caterpillar to the 2nd or 3rd instar to be certain that its actually a monarch cat.

No. I look at this plant every day. It's like other milkweed flowering stems where you have one main stem and then it branches to several stems where the flowers bloom, except instead of flowers, it's seed pods - like 5 seed pods opening at different times on the one main stem. And they have Milkweed Bugs just waiting for that pod to open! The seeds are flat brown (like a flattened dried up black-eyed pea) and attached to a silky white blow-away "parachute"... to help carry them for growing. Each pod holds no less than 50 seeds. Now, the seed pod may start out looking like a teeny tiny cauliflower (if I recall), but it's nothing that produces nectar as there is nothing that comes to it - Monarchs/bees/hummers/flies flutter around my flowering milkweed all day. I will try to get a pic when I can. Monarch Watch was at our local botanical garden last weekend and I talked to a few of the workers and no one could help. Maybe I need to go back to the nursery where they were purchased! And I agree, Orange Butterfly Weed is pretty! I wish I had some!!! The leaves of this one are identical to the Swamp Milkweed (with the light pink flowers).

I've studied photos of various milkweed on line and it looks like common can, at times, display a pinkish purple coloring of the middle vein of the leaf. To my knowledge, all the common I have originated from the original pot planting and those leaves have white middle veins. By the little I've found online about Purple MW and it's root structure, it pretty much forms colonies so I doubt another stalk would be coming up so far away from a mother plant. I should have at least taken photos and included with my question. :-) I've never had so many Monarch cats this early in the year and most of the young growth of milkweed has gone into their tummies. Hopefully, the mw, no matter the variety, is strong enough to come back. Mary