Butterflies implicated in Kew Gardens Fotherington-Thomas episode

I am about to be as wet as a Bank Holiday weekend, so I’d have an umbrella handy – not to mention a shot of insulin.

We took advantage of the weather yesterday to visit my favourite place on Earth, Kew Gardens. Yes, it was a sunny Sunday, and yes it was packed, but it’s big enough to absorb crowds, and, besides, it makes a Londoner feel proud that people flock from all over the world to enjoy this glorious, celebratory place. 

The nice thing about the visitors course, is that, apart from the occasional sulky youngster, they all want to be there, and, because it’s fairly pricey (£13.50), there’s a distinct lack of riff-raff whiling away an afternoon prior to getting bladdered in the evening. In other words, you get to spend time with enthusiastic, civilized people, which is always pleasant.. 

Yesterday my impression was that there were lots of tall, elegant Africans, dark-skinned Indians, and Germans (I’ll refrain from describing them as looking either efficient or ruthless). What united them all was their evident jolliness in the presence of Nature at its most benign. In fact, this was so cheering that I even managed to partially ignore the rap and rock music emanating from some nearby open air music event – amplified outdoor music is the devil’s invention: I’d rather spend time at an estate agents’ convention than attend an open-air rock festival. 

There’s almost invariably an unexpected treat at Kew: yesterday, we found it at one end of the Princess of Wales’s Conservatory, where, for the next few weeks,  hundreds and hundreds of butterflies can be found floating around inside. 

Now, most of us will have visited a Butterfly House with the kids at some stage, and will have enjoyed the experience, but there’s something about coming upon butterflies where they aren’t normally to be found that isutterly magical. Stepping through the door and realizing that the air was alive with what the poet Robert Frost called “sky flakes” made one’s heart simply bounce with delight: I have never seen so many goofy smiles of sheer, enraptured pleasure on the faces of so many people representing so many age-groups and so many races in one small space – all the more remarkable when you consider that the effect was achieved without drink or drugs or any form of “organized” entertainment: there was no gushing voice-over telling us to be amazed or impressed, and no musical soundtrack to signal that we should be experiencing wonder any time around now.

During the whole half hour we there, we heard nothing but ecstatic “oohs” and “ahs”. Several times I found myself laughing with delight, and then becoming all misty-eyed (could be the menopause, I suppose). My favourite overheard remark of the afternoon was from an American: “Gee, that one’s got four wings!” as he pointed out two large green butterflies enthusiastically demonstrating a key stage in the mating cycle of large green butterflies.

I doubt if anyone didn’t emerge from that room happier and more content with life than when they entered thanks to what Frost (again) called “flowers that fly and all but sing”.

So, many thanks to the wonderful people who run and fund Kew Gardens for affording me a third peak experience involving these weightless, fluttery scraps of deranged joy. The first was during our first visit to the Dolomites, almost 20 years ago, when dozens of black and white examples, like flying checkerboards, flittered cheerfully about a flower-strewn Alpine meadow in blazing sunshine behind the farmhouse where we were staying. The second was about ten years ago in Suffolk, near Walberswick, when hundreds of cabbage whites and some blue chums suddenly began frollicking in front of me like a squadron of tiny stunt-pilots as I cycled down an alley formed by low-lying trees. Let’s hope I’m still here in 2020 for the next Big Experience.

The butterflies are there until 5th September, should the fancy take you.