MY BUTTERFLY COLLECTION

You may see a butterfly in your garden, or a caterpillar munching on leaves, or a new butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. You may see a butterfly as you walk along the street, or as you look out your window you may see one flying nearby. Butterflies not only beautify our environment, but they are also essential pollinators as they fly among the flowers in the garden. They beautify our world as they spread their colorful and delicate wings to soar among the petals. Like bees, butterflies are on a vital mission as they fill our gardens with their energy, and go about their predetermined mission to visit flowers, drink nectar, collect pollen on their wings and spread it to other flowers, mate and disperse eggs. My Butterfly Collection: On the Wings of the Butterfly is dedicated to creating a greater awareness of the importance of butterflies, as we share their beauty and better understand their essential role in nature, and their struggle to survive in these challenging and perilous times. My Butterfly Collection is also devoted to personal change, metamorphosis, and the power and spirit of transformation. We'll take time to discover how we can live more lightly on the earth; what we need to do to protect and nurture Monarchs, Mission Blues, Painted Ladies, Swallowtails, and all the other butterflies; and how to grow the host plants and flowers they depend on, such as milkweed, lupine, and others. Butterflies have always been one of my great interests, passions, and a source of fascination. Over the years, I have been active in protecting them, learning about their life cycles, and planting the flowers they need by creating a butterfly garden. Butterflies are colorful, distinctive, and beautiful reminders of nature's perfect balance, gentle power, and unique diversity. Butterflies are perfect symbols of alteration, change, life, death, and personal transformation. Butterflies have appeared in poetry, literature and other writing over the centuries and around the world. They appear in novels and writings of authors such as Vladimir Nabokov (he was also a respected lepidopterist), Tom Robbins, P.G. Wodehouse, and Robert Frost. They appear in children's books such as Hope for the Flowers and I Never Saw Another Butterfly and in many informative non-fiction books, scientific books, and guides for identifying butterflies and creating butterfly gardens. Closely scrutinized butterflies can be found in scientific studies about their range, wingspan, lifespan, and feeding habits; reported in books and scientific studies prepared by distinguished entomologists and lepidopterists like David Brower, Lincoln Brower, Tom Emmel, Jeffrey Glassberg, John Hefernick, David Nunnallee, Liam O'Brien, Robert Pyle, Harriet Reinhard, Arthur Shapiro, Frederick Urquhart (the scientist who discovered the Monarch's wintering grounds in Mexico), and others. Many other experts provide information on creating butterfly gardens, using native plants, propagation of plants and flowers, and helping us more fully understand the importance of butterflies. They include Jo Brewer, Jeffrey Caldwell, Barbara Deutsch, Julian Donahue, Tony Gomez, Louise Hallberg, Louise Lacey, Jack Schieffelin, Jake Sigg, Sally Levinson, Andy Liu, and others.