Butterfly kiss

It's been quite a month for butterflies. This Dark Green Fritillary Argynnis aglaja (named for the colour of its underside) is one of the less common and I was pleased to get such a sharp image. It was on a beautiful evening after a damp day and butterflies were out in force making the most of the warm sunshine and the profusion of flowers on the coast. This one had settled on a scabious flower but the food plant of its larvae is violet leaves.

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the enjoyment of timelessness - in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory.