Butterflies

I was going to show you photos of the butterflies on the buddleia bush in my garden, the other day before the rain started, so I’ll show you them today instead.  No wonder the buddleia is called the butterfly bush!  Butterflies love the long purple clouds of tiny flowers that make up each spike, and will flit from purple spike to purple spike, sometimes having a whole one to themselves or on occasion sharing between two.

There are the tortoiseshell butterflies,

the red admirals,

 

 

 

and the peacocks with their large round eyes to warn off predators.  So many on one bush, one warm sunny day.  I wonder where they lurk when the rain falls.

 

 

There are white butterflies too, creamy white with grey black tips to their wings, but they never stay still long enough to have their photos taken, always on the move, fluttering here and there.  It’s a wonder they pay any attention at all to the buddleia when they have a garden of vegetables next door, though Heather wages war with them, picking off the caterpillars whenever she finds them amongst her cabbages and courgettes. 

I remember collecting caterpillars from the flowering currant bush in a garden along our street  when I was a child.  We collected them in glass jam jars, gave them fresh flowering currant leaves to eat each day, and covered the tops of the  jars with paper jam pot covers pricked with air holes, secured  with elastic bands. We’d keep them in our bedrooms, or take them to school, taking them out to crawl and tickle along our fingers or curl up into little coils in our hands while we cleaned out the jars and put in fresh leaves.   Day by day we watched and fed them – did they shed skins?  I think they did! -  till they made chrysalises, and then the day would come when we would see them beginning to hatch.  That was when mothers - or our teachers - made us put them outside to hatch out as butterflies!  They were always cabbage whites and for years I thought they were the only type of butterfly that existed.  I know better now!

Just to finish off here’s a scrapbook layout I did using a couple of the photos!

Talk again soon.