By K.A. Laity
Chances are you've spent the last few days desperately defending your small shop from local thugs, wearing your fingers out texting your thug pals for the next riot hotspot, or sobbing quietly as the world seemed to be melting into a fiery ball before your stunned eyes.
When the latest round of cynical politicians trying to capitalise on tragedy for gains in the polls or just to sabotage their rivals gets you down, you need something to restore the will to live.
Just outside London in the rolling green of Hertfordshire you will find the Butterfly World Project, an oasis of beauty and peace that will provide the antidote to fire, police sirens and screams of horror. This £27 million project was conceived by Clive Farrell, a butterfly fanatic and lepidopterist whose dream was to create a tribute to the butterfly and a dedicated centre of learning for the preservation of this fragile and beautiful species. The project is now in Phase III and by the winter of 2012, should be the biggest butterfly experience in the world.
Check out their tropical butterfly house, which features hundreds of tropical butterflies, to include the Blue Morpho, The Monarch, Swallowtail, Owl, Helliconius, Clearwing and many more. Over in the Butterfly Breeding House you can see the tiny eggs, pupae and caterpillars and watch the butterflies emerging from their pupae.
Celebrated garden designer and chief landscape architect for the project Ivan Hicks has created an incredible attraction for anyone interested in gardening, an array of different gardens from ‘The Theatre of Insects’ to ‘Through the Flowerpot Garden’, in which you are transformed into ‘insect size’ and can walk through a giant flowerpot. There are over 20 acres of wildflower meadows at Butterfly World, which provide a wonderful nectar transfusion for the butterflies and insects.
The new dedicated teaching area, The Insect Study Centre, generously sponsored by The Royal Entomological Society makes the BWP a great destination for families or school groups, too.
Of the 54 resident butterfly species in the UK, (there are four regular migrant species also), seven out of ten are in decline. During the 20th century five of Britain’s butterfly species and 60 moth species became extinct. In Hertfordshire, one of the worst hit counties, 17 species have been lost in the last century. Join patrons like Sir David Attenborough, Professor Dr David Bellamy, Alan Titchmarsh, Emilia Fox and Baroness Helena Kennedy to explore the peaceful and beautiful world of the butterflies.
Find the BWP on Twitter and Facebook, or check out their YouTube channel.
K. A. Laity writes so much that she had to create some pseudonyms to keep her colleagues from thoughts of murder. A tenured medievalist at a small liberal arts college, she mostly tries to find ways to avoid meetings in order to write more . Find her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter where she's desperately attempting to jettison most of her belongings before moving to Ireland next month for a Fulbright at the Moore Institute of NUI Galway.