FLOWERS & FLUTTERS
I Know a Spot
AT ALLEN ACRES B&B, YOU CAN REST, RESEARCH, AND REAWAKEN Story and photos by Lucie Monk Carter
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n hindsight, the moth wishes he’d eaten more in his carefree caterpillar days. Salads of sweet gum leaves for breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and midnight snack had seemed filling in the moment. He’d certainly felt queasy spinning round and round to form his silk cocoon. But then he emerged, and he had no mouth. Would one more medley of leaves have hurt? With a slight upcharge for added bacon? The moth sets aside his regrets. He has one week left to live, and in that time must find a mate. They will not kiss—see above, re: vestigial mouth—but the good family name will carry on. I meet him through his longest legacy, a photograph. He’s lime-green with little eyespots on his comblike wings. He’s called the luna moth, now living in an album alongside 880 other moth species who’ve fluttered through Allen Acres. I knew little about the moth and less about his digestion before I went to this unrestrained nature preserve in West Louisiana, where enthusiasm for the environment is stoked at every turn. Here the titular
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and renowned Dr. Charles Allen, author of a dozen books and identifier of some fifty thousand species, has planted his twenty-six-acre property with bait for moths and butterflies: spicebush and sassafras, milkweed and lantana, rhododendron and Mexican sunflower. The insects hide in tall stands of yellow wild indigo or float down onto a zinnia’s wide bloom. Hobbyist humans arrive in their fluttered wakes and can make camp in a five-room lodge shaded by a glorious buckeye tree that collects hummingbirds. There are valuable classes on plant identification, goofy and gaudy art installations stacked among the trees (e.g. a “Hurricane Warning System” of rusted farm tools dangling from wire), International Moth Week as a grand annual fete, and happy hosts always ready for the smallest of small talk. With my husband and two young children, I spent an April weekend at Allen Acres. We tailed an edible plants class ‘til they steeped fresh-plucked clover for tea, and wound our own way through the trails and into the nearby Kistachie National Forest too. My field notes follow.
