Bringin' It On Home.

It's been since March since I've written about the garden. Sure, there have been Confessions, just not about the garden.


So, this mid-July morning, in this summer heat and sun, before the afternoon rain, come home to the garden with me:

'Til the next round of Confessions, be well, keep cool, and enjoy the summer bflies around your home. 

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Irish Butterflies 2.

Trim. Dunfanaghy. Belfast. Derry. Donegal. Galway. Cork. Dingle and Dublin. Inland waterfalls and seaside cliffs. Green, and I mean green, patches of farmland divvied up with lines of trees and rock. Fairy-like gardens and faery hills. Vallies and slopes, ancient man-made 'beehive huts'  and cozy foot bridges. Untold castles, church ruins, and graveyards. Rows of pastel-colored homes and store fronts on winding roads through  tiny towns that all look the same but distinctly different. Distilleries, breweries and the liveliest, kindest, welcome-est pubs on earth.

And yes, butterflies.



Queen Anne's Lace in ruin window



Just outside of Trim proper, if you stir up the long summer grasses  in  Newtown's cathedral ruins  of  Saints Paul & Peter,  white butterflies flit across your path. And that's their bfly name - whites. Coulda been small whites, green-veined whites, large or wood whites. Whatever whites they were, they flew fast and low, well away from me and my tromp through their ancient habitat. They headed toward the two-lane road or the low rock wall, and along the stream bank lined with Queen Anne's lace. They twirled around the stone celtic crosses and through the once-windows of the church ruin, trailing your eye past bushes, blue sky, gray sky, and mounds of clouds much like the skies of Florida's beaches.

Ruins and celtic cross

I found butterflies in one more place, a place that made it possible for me to bring home the spirit & image of Irish butterflies.  In downtown Dingle, across from the moored boats and near the oyster cafe, is the dearest little linen & lace shop called The Linen Chest. It's all bright white from shelf to wall to counter top. And it had butterfly goodies.

Of course they came home with me.

Hand-sewn lace butterfly in a frame.

A bfly tooth pillow that 

I stuffed with clover from

the cliff path along

Giant's Causeway.

A bfly linen bag filled with lavender, mmmmm.

Mmmmm - good word for the whole trip, butterflies and all! 

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Irish Butterflies.

I'm supposed to be researching hotels and B-and-B's for our summer Ireland trip. Really, I'm supposed to be prepping for Easter, but I've got a nasty cold.

However,  instead of googling Irish get-aways, I typed the words Irish butterflies.

Fritillaries (silver-washed and pearl-bordered instead of our gulf frit), holly blues, and essex skippers.

Red admirals (central and north Florida on this side of the pond), ringlets, graylings, and gatekeepers.

It's truly a beautiful way to get to know the country's natural side - words like wood (versus forest),  burren (a rocky landscape) and bog (that's Irish for a spongy swamp)  dot descriptions of butterfly habitats.

Bogs throughout the  UK risk overharvesting of peat - a coal used for fuel and heating. The Scots like peat for whiskey, too, but alas, even the Scots have given up 30 hectares to conserving the Wester Moss, a bog outside the charming city of Stirling host to the rare large heath butterfly. Actually, I came across a ton of UK websites and articles about bfly conservation and plans for the world's largest butterfly house. I guess their yesteryear fascination with butterflies filtered into later generations.

I do have a little Irish bfly - a gift from a dear friend and fellow bfly gardener. She visited the Waterford Crystal factory during her trip to Ireland, and came back with these gems, one for another dear friend and bfly gardener, and one for me:

She's landed on my Easter table for the weekend. In time, she'll flit back to my kitchen window to perch by the violets.

Happy Passover, Happy Easter, and Irish bfly blessins' to yeh, dear Confessions Readers.

Next On My List.

17th century Somerset, England.

Lady Eleanor Glanville. 

Inherited vast estates from her father.

Paid her servants to collect butterflies in thin, glassine papers.

A violent husband and their ungrateful children declared her 'mad' in an attempt to steal her properties.

Nearly lost her case due to her butterfly collecting and reports from neighbors that she was seen outdoors 'half-dressed' (tank top and shorts?) and beating bushes to collect 'worms' (that would be cats) in drapes of cloth.

After her death, Forest, a son, contested her will that left him a meager legacy. He won on grounds of her 'lunacy' and inherited his mother's fortune.

Part of her bfly collection is housed in London's Natural History Museum. God (and hubby) help me, I'll get back to England for the Jack-the-Ripper tour and the Natural History Museum's bfly collection. 

So, back to Eleanor. Don't you just wanna read a book about her life??

I do.

And I found one. As soon as I finish The Sound of Butterflies by Rachel King (a STRANGE Edwardian-era tale of a British fellow in the Brazilian rain forests and his erotic, yes, erotic obsession with butterfly pursuit and collection), next on my list is Lady of the Butterflies by Fiona Mountain.

Now to go outside 'half-dressed' to see how the 'worms' are doing.

See you on the flip-side, Confessions readers.

Dead Butterflies.

I possess three, um, dead butterflies - one boxed, one pressed like a keepsake, and one artfully mounted. I could say I 'own' these bflies, but that implies that I sought them out or bought them myself.

The boxed one is a male monarch in a cheap cassette-tape holder, tossed on a storage shelf at work.

I control the inventory in that room, and I knew at least ten years had passed since that monarch had wound up there. I could've housed him with the microscopes and slide specimens, but he came home with me. I have plans for him, too.

Which leads to my pressed butterfly - another boy of the monarch persuasion, flattened in a book.  My mother found him during the poignant process of helping a friend go through her mother's things after she'd passed from this world to a heaven plentiful with butterflies. So the little guy was passed on to a good home, namely, mine. The presentation to me was quite ceremonial - Mom's Dave framed the fella, and I got a thorough explanation of his discovery and the painstaking framing process. Once I find a complimentary frame, the storage-shelf bfly will get the same decorative treatment.

My mounted butterfly was a Christmas gift - Dave as well. He was worried I'd not like such a gift, seeing as I raise and release bflies. Still, I named her Victoria and hung her in my home office, a.k.a. "the butterfly room." She's more mounted than pressed, her yellow wings lifted as in flight. And she's the bfly in the Butterfly Confessions Also logo. I've no idea her species nor origin. She was bought at a retail shop and the frame says "Made In China."

What strikes me most about these butterflies are their colors - they never fade. They own their colors. Or do they possess them...?

Serendipity Also.

I saw the empty chrysalis first,  thinking Ugh, I MISSED Lucretia. Then her orange tint flashed on the gargoyle's opposite wing. Fearing she'd take flight any moment, I ran QUICKLY into the house for my camera, and QUICKLY back to the garden.

She modeled all her gothic glory in the bright sun:



We took a trip together to the dill and pentas patch.

She flit from my finger to the spindly dill...

...showing off her monarch lady-like thick black lines:

  

The garden's dill released scent with the brush of my hand and her wing.  Dill is meant to play host plant for the black swallowtails, but they've yet to find it. So, Lucretia adopted it as a hang spot while her wings dried. 

Lucretia, being a monarch, is prone to migratory habits. But South Florida's warm March weather may keep her nearby, a member of South Florida's non-migratory "sink population" of monarchs. Or, since it's March, she could be a daughter of migratory monarchs passing through as they "wake up" from their overwinter in Mexico.

Whatever her roots, I'm thrilled she spent time in my garden and on my gargoyle.

References for this post:
Florida's 'sink population'
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/uw311
Monarch Spring migration:

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/monarch/spring2011/update031711.html

For video of Lucretia and her grotesque-style gargoyle, 'Like' Butterfly Confessions Also on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Butterfly-Confessions-Also/138588801956

Serendipity.

Ser∙en∙dip∙i∙ty (ser-ĕn-dip-ĭ-tee) n. the making of pleasant discoveries by accident [and] a knack for doing so.

     From the OAD(Oxford American Dictionary) ©1979, the paperback edition that sits on my desk between a Roget’s Thesaurus and two copies of my book Confessions of a Butterfly Gardener. 

     In case you don't recognize the wings, paws and haunch pictured here, that's Muscadine - guardian grotesque of the butterfly garden and named for a wine grape that can stand Florida's summer heat.  Cats have pupated on him in the past, their empty, shredded chyrsalises a tease and a testament to what I missed.

     But no missing THIS one. Still wet from a garden watering, this jade gem sparkled in the afternoon sun - a beauty to the beast from which she hung.

Or he.

Magnifying glass in hand, I paused work on this chapter of Bfly Also and headed to the garden. Daylight Saving Time shone bright at six o'clock in the evening, and I was hopeful to find the teensy evidence of monarch male versus female located by the cremaster.

Cremaster.

/kri'mast'ә/ ▪ n. 2. Entomology. The hook-like tip of a butterfly pupa. Origin, Greek, kremastēr, from krema - 'hang'.

From the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) © 2004, eleventh edition, the hardcover that sits on my desk between  Deadly Doses: A Writer's Guide to Poisons and a copy of some wine guide that I've never cracked because it's on my desk and not the kitchen where it should be.
      Though the necessary spot on the chrysalis is twirled against a bump on Muscadine's sculpted wing, my guess is female.

Such a challenge to come up with a name befitting a lady bfly  pupating on a gargoyle wing. It called for something dark, something gothic. I turned to Confessions readers for help, and got...Lucretia. 

It's from a song.  

This reader dug deep into gothic music territory back to the godfathers of gothic rock, The Sisters of Mercy. They in turn dug deep into Italian Renaissance territory for the name 'Lucretia', a nod to Lucrezia Borgia, famous for her role in the power-hungry Borgias' rise to Italian power, infamous for her rumored poison ring and its role at dinner parties.

Lucretia, the gothic butterfly. Perhaps I'll serendipitously catch her emergence.

Reference for this post: Various sources concerning Lucretia/Lucrezia, including:http://www.allmusic.com/song/t1529650



Metamorphosis.

Lately, it's the Confessions, not the garden, that've gone by the wayside.


The garden looks great.
.

The cat house had two guests - first, a purchased pupa of a tiger swallowtail named Phoenix.

He emerged beautifully. I have cell phone video of him, but nothing prepared to post for Bfly Confessions Also.

ALTHOUGH, if you head on over to Butterfly Confessions Also on FB, you'll see the most recent cat house guest - Lovegood. A fuzzy, pale-green luna moth. As beautiful as the words 'luna moth' imply.

So, truly, all is fine with the garden. I just haven't written about it.

.
I suppose we (meaning the garden and I) have reached a point in our relationship where we'll be in each other's lives whether I write about it or not. You, as a Confessions reader, have been with us on that journey, and I hope that you've enjoyed the ride.

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So, here I am, back to writing it about it. But the nature of the posts may change a bit - it will always be butterflies, but it may not always be about my garden. You see, blogging time has morphed into reading time.

I mean, there's gardening. Yoga. Walking.  All that.  Did an 'official' walk a few weeks ago - a lovely Saturday morning mile walk to raise money for the SPCA's horse rescue efforts. Joined a gorgeous yoga studio.


But the reading is what put the dent in the blogging.

I FINALLY finished Wilkie Collin's The Moonstone that I started months ago. I have a weakness for old English novels, particularly if they are touted as the world's greatest detective story.


Then there's Vicki Myron's Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched The World. I adore libraries. I adore cats. There you have it.

Then I immersed myself  in Tara Cleves' The Guardian of Baine Manor - my first ebook read. You mystery and ghost story lovers would eat it up. I couldn't resist the cover, and the story has oh-so-paid-off with plenty of romance, suspense, ghosts, gargoyles, even a butterfly garden, all set around central Florida and the Keys. Loved it and I hope she makes good on her promise for a second novel.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Guardian-of-Baine-Manor/Tara-Cleves/e/2940011134456/?itm=1

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And now what's got my pages all a-flutter?  It's all the literature I've found of late on butterflies. Not just field guides - I'm talking literary prose and naturalist journals. Though I'm not happy about letting my bfly blog slide, I'm thankful I used the time to discover such gems as Sharman Apt Russel's An Obsession With Butterflies and the stories of lady lepidopterists like 17th-century Eleanor Glanville and Victorian-era Margaret Fountaine.

What I'm reading, what I'm learning, well, it's going to trickle into Confessions. Bear with me as I explore this new vein for the blog - it's truly a happy metamorphosis (and I promise to throw in the beauty of the bfly garden and its bflies, too.)