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The Tennessee Department of Transportation is helping create habitats for the Monarch Butterfly and other pollinators through the U.S. postal service; mailing packs of milkweed seeds to any state resident who wants to plant the flower that serves as the iconic orange and black insect’s exclusive egg-laying crib.

[Above photo by the Tennessee DOT]

Milkweed naturally grows around the country, but extreme heat and drought have reduced the number of milkweed plants in North America. Fewer milkweed plants mean fewer Monarchs, and fewer Monarchs mean less pollination for all plant life.

Tennessee DOT started Project Milkweed in 2023, “and we had a good response,” said Michael McClanahan, the agency’s transportation manager in the highway beautification office. As the word spread that Tennessee DOT would send free seeds to people to plant in their gardens, the demand for the tiny seeds ramped up, “and it wound up going viral.”

After replenishing their supply of seeds a few times because of overwhelming demand, the agency finally ran out of seeds and had to stop taking orders. Final total: 780,000 packs of milkweed seeds mailed out across Tennessee in 2023.

At 20 seeds per pack, that’s more than 15 million seeds Tennessee DOT spread to all corners of the Volunteer State.

“We knew we had lightning in a bottle,” McClanahan said, with department staffers so busy keeping up with the demand that, “honestly, we’re struggling to do some after-action reporting on it.”

Tennessee DOT restarted the program this June to coincide with National Pollinator Week. Tennessee residents can request one pack of either red milkweed seeds for small gardens or common milkweed seeds for larger areas.

Milkweed is ideally planted in early fall, with the plant usually flowering in July; meaning those sent out 2023 seeds are set to bloom in this year, in 2024. Although the Monarch Butterfly will feed from – and pollinate – a variety of plants that have nectar, the insects seek out milkweed to lay their eggs because the caterpillar that emerges from its egg can only feed on milkweed leaves.

That species of butterfly is also an impressive migrator and it makes an annual winter trek to the mountains of central Mexico in a trip that takes up to four generations of butterflies to complete.

Because of their short life spans, Monarchs will stop along the way, lay eggs, and die, passing a DNA roadmap to their offspring, who will take the baton and continue the trip that their great-grandmothers started.

Entomologists have been sounding the alarm for years that the winter gathering of Monarchs in Mexico are getting smaller. A World Wildlife Fund report estimated the number of Monarchs making the trip in 2023-2024 may have been 59 percent lower than the previous winter.

“They are critically threatened,” Tennessee DOT’s McClanahan said. “This program is something we were able to do that was a little more targeted to what the Monarchs need.”

The agency has been recognized in the past for its efforts to aid pollination. In January, the department received the 2023 Pollinator Roadside Management award from the North American Pollinator Partnership Campaign for its roadside practices.

McClanahan noted that his office usually handles “litter pickup and landscaping, and scenic roads, but this is easily one of the most popular offerings we’ve undertaken. We think it may be one of the largest seeds offerings in the country. It’s just been surprising to us how widespread the interest was among people to do the right things in their gardens.”

A recent Illinois Department of Transportation blog post provided an inside look at how the agency manages roadside vegetation along state roads and rest areas – work that is the specialty of Andy Star (above), who joined the agency in 2020 after nearly two decades in the private sector.

[Above photo by the Illinois DOT]

Stahr – a roadside management specialist serving Illinois DOT District 3 – is responsible for managing all the off-road, or “roadside,” conditions, in the counties of Dekalb, Kendall, LaSalle, Bureau, Grundy, Livingston, Kankakee, Iroquois, and Ford.

“This typically includes working with the district maintenance yards and deploying our Landscape Section highway maintainers in the management of roadside vegetation as well as man­agement of the rest area facilities and grounds,” he explained in the blog post. “District 3 has approximately 12,000 acres of vegetation to manage and is responsible for eight interstate rest area buildings.”

Stahr said vegetation management tasks include overseeing the implementation of mowing policy; the agency’s herbicide spraying program; and the installation of new turf, pollinator plantings or landscape plantings.

“An argument could be made that the most important impact of the work I do, in the big picture anyway, is the creation, enhancement and preservation of pollinator and prairie habitats along Illinois DOT rights of way,” he said.

“However, the most important and direct impact of my work to the traveling public is more likely keeping the rest areas open and functioning properly,” Stahr noted.

“Doing so provides a safe space for travelers to stop and rest. These facilities also provide shelter to travelers in times of severe weather. The buildings have provided a safe place for drivers during tornado-like conditions,” he explained. “We’ve also heard from truck drivers that the rest areas have literally saved their lives by providing a warm place to shelter when their truck broke down in the dead of winter and nobody can get to them due to bad road conditions.”

Sthar is a U.S. Army veteran and University of Illinois graduate with a bachelor’s in landscape architecture. While in college, he was selected as one of 17 students on a project team to travel to Agra, India, for a site visit. “We spent two and a half weeks in India and spent the semester designing a tourism corridor around the Taj Mahal,” he noted.

Following school, Stahr worked for a multidisciplinary engineering and architecture firm in multiple professional design disciplines – work experience he said “opened my eyes” to the complex nature of development projects.

“Whether it’s a new retail store or a roadway project, it takes a team of professionals to successfully complete these projects,” he said. “In the years before I joined Illinois DOT, I worked for an ecological restoration firm. That experience prepared me for vegetation management and gave me a thorough understanding of how to design, install, and maintain native plantings and pollinator sites successfully.”