Magical creatures AN APPRECIATION OF BUTTERFLIES
When the National Trust asked people to write down what butterflies meant to them, most revealed they had fallen under their spell in childhood and expressed a view that these winged creatures reminded them strongly of those halcyon days. One noted: ‘These fragile, winged beauties make me feel the enthusiasm and sheer joy that children know and adults forget.’ Butterflies, then, are symbols of something precious that has been lost, some much-missed part of ourselves, of yesterdays gone by.
My own early childhood memory is of catching a small and delicate white butterfly resting on a red rose before releasing it into a brightening sky. The image – no, the very experience – remains wondrously clear. But it was the summer of 1964 when, in Somerset, a young butterfly enthusiast was unleashed on the unsuspecting countryside armed with The Observer’s Book of Butterflies. The Beatles were Number One with ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and the clouded yellows were in: I caught one of these golden speedsters in a pink shrimping net in a wildflower combe that has long since become a cereal field.
Within the butterflying world, high summer is about fulfilment of spring’s promise, and of the year itself. In the woods of southern England it is purple emperor season, majestically soaring above the tree tops. On the downs, marbled whites and ringlets appear, on the heaths silver-studded blues, and up north the large heath and the mountain ringlet, the king of the mountains.
More of our species are on the wing in late July than at any other time of year and then August is the month for garden butterflies; the cabbage whites, then the hatch of brimstones, peacocks, a new brood of small tortoiseshells, and red admirals and painted ladies. Buddleias flower at precisely the right time for this pageant.
Butterflies take us deep into many of the most wonderful landscapes in the British Isles, and when those places are at the very zenith of their annual cycles of natural beauty, on sublime days in spring and summer. They take us out of the material world in which we are entrapped. They take us to where the spirit of place is so awesome that when we leave, part of ourselves remains, and we take some essence of that place away with us.
Those of us who are hard-wired to beauty – which should be all of us – will find that butterflies have much to offer. This is not simply because of the beauty of their wings, and the grace of their flight, or their relationship with flowers, but because they exist in the most wonderful places, in the best of weathers, in the greatest of seasons.
Matthew Oates is a a special advisor for the National Trust. This article was adapted from his book, In Pursuit of Butterflies: a Fifty-Year Affair (Bloomsbury).