Butterfly Farmer

If his parents had had their way--and in 19th century England, parents usually did--Leonard Woods Newman would have been a London tobacco broker. Apprenticed at 18, he began his career dutifully enough. Then, one warm June morning as he pedaled his bicycle to the Bexley railroad station, he fell in love--with a swarm of Clouded Yellow butterflies.

After that, no office could hold him. For the rest of his life, with the pure, cold, scientific passion of a lepidopterist, he was true to butterflies. He even found a girl who was willing to spend her evenings in his "Bug Room," setting specimens and cataloguing his collection. His subsequent marriage became an insect-ridden partnership. Between them, Newman and his wife built their hobby of butterfly-farming into a paying business.

Precocious Skill. Although he had had to defy his own parents on a choice of career, Newman had no trouble with his own son, Leonard Hugh. Born on the Bexley butterfly farm, the boy grew up in a fluttering world that was timed to the persistent rhythm of mating, egg laying, caterpillar collecting, pupation and maturing butterflies. Before he was eight, he was showing precocious skill at spotting rare specimens. "There had never been any question of an alternative career for me," acknowledges Leonard Hugh in a book, Butterfly Farmer, just published in England (Phoenix House Ltd.).

While he was still an adolescent, his father's farm had begun filling orders from all over the world. The New Zealand government sent for 60,000 pupae of the Cinnabar moth, hoping the caterpillars might eat up the country's ragwort weed. The Newmans supplied the pupae and the moths did well in New Zealand. They even ate some ragwort. But eventually, New Zealand birds ate most of the Cinnabars.

Few Complaints. Apollos, Tortoiseshells, Small Coppers, Red Admirals and Queens of Spain--over the years the Newmans have collected them all. Neither two world wars nor the 1931 British financial crisis was enough to put the farm out of business. However, Hugh did resent it when he had to collect moths. No true butterfly man likes to go blundering through the damp bracken in the dark, flailing at bushes and clutching brambles.

But, by and large, Hugh has enjoyed his work. He has been able to earn his living in a fascinating branch of science that makes a study of rare and beautiful creatures. He has also enjoyed the society of Britain's leading lepidopterists. Before he died, Lord Walter Rothschild was a steady customer; today, Sir Winston Churchill depends on the Bexley farm to supply him with butterflies for his garden parties. (The Newmans once supplied Tortoiseshells and Peacocks on short notice, at other times have stocked the Chartwell grounds with the larvae of Painted Ladies.) Biggest satisfaction of all: Hugh's five-year-old son is already mastering the fine points of the game --"The stealthy approach, net bag between finger and thumb, the gradual moving closer and closer to the butterfly sitting on a flower head with wings outspread."

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