Painting with plants 🌱✒️: a Promethea silkmoth made from acorns, sumac, and oak galls.

Inspired to give painting moths a try after I found little bitty baby Promethea caterpillars feasting on our buttonbush. We’ve met several giant silkmoths over our years here. Lunas flashing by after dark, pine Imperials skrunking along by the firepit. Chonky bright green Cecropia caterpillars like a schoolbus carrying bumpy red and yellow passengers on its back.

Silkmoths are in the same category for me as glow-in-the-dark mushrooms. Wonders I had no idea existed here until I left my urban cocoon. If wishes were horses, the stallion of my stable would be the wish my Ontario schooling had spent more time on all the magical creatures in our backyard. All the precious and intricate, violent and tender, fierce and delicate lives that walk, flutter, swim, slither, burrow, and fly alongside us.

"In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear... they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." ~Henry Beston

Have a good week folks 🦋