The butterfly houses came out of a specific summer — dry, hot, relentless. Peggy had planted a full cottage garden by then: lavender, marjoram, verbena, teasel. The flowers were excellent. The butterflies came to feed, circled, and left. They never settled. They never stayed.
"I started really watching. Not just glancing — watching. Where were they going after they fed? What were they doing? And I noticed they kept coming back to one corner of the wall, where there was a damp patch of moss and a bit of sandy soil from where I'd been laying slabs. They were landing there, staying there. Not feeding. Just... absorbing."
That damp patch of sandy soil was providing something the flowers couldn't: minerals. Sodium, potassium, calcium — salts that butterflies need for reproduction and flight that they can't get from nectar alone. The behaviour has a name: puddling. And in a tidy garden with paved surfaces and weed-free beds, there is nowhere left to do it.
"I'd given them a feast and forgotten they also needed a drink. And not just any drink."