White butterfly
A white butterfly drifting past can feel like a hopeful sign. In most North American yards it is a cabbage white, lovely to watch and hard on the vegetables, so it also raises an honest question about the things you like and resent at once.
What it may mean
Gardeners have mixed feelings about the white butterfly, and with good reason. The cabbage white floats over a summer garden like a scrap of paper, pretty and harmless to look at, while its green caterpillars chew holes in the broccoli and kale below. Both are the same creature at different moments. That double role is a useful mirror for the parts of your life that you love and grumble about in the same breath: a relative, a job, a house that eats your weekends. Liking something and finding it costly are not opposites. For many people a white butterfly is simply a cheerful sign, and it can be that too, but this one also asks for some honesty about what you would keep, holes and all.
Depending on how you saw it
Over the vegetable bed
A white butterfly lingering over cabbage, kale or broccoli is a female looking for a leaf to lay her eggs on. She tastes the plant with her feet before she chooses. Which choice coming up deserves a little testing before you commit, the way she touches every leaf first?
Two white butterflies spiraling upward
Two whites twisting around each other in a rising spiral are often a male courting a female, and sometimes she simply flies higher and higher until he gives up. Which pursuit in your life would end more gracefully if you read the signals sooner?
In a weedy lot or by the roadside
Cabbage whites thrive in vacant lots, along highways and in parking strips, wherever wild mustards grow. They do well in places that look unpromising. Which of your own unpromising corners, a dull commute or a small apartment, has more going for it than you give it credit for?
A white butterfly late in the fall
Whites keep flying well into the fall, long after most other butterflies have gone, as long as the days stay mild. They simply carry on while conditions allow. What could you still finish this season if you stopped assuming it was already over?
Why it happens in nature
The white butterfly seen in most of North America is the cabbage white, which arrived from Europe in Quebec around 1860 and spread across the continent within a few decades. It is out early in spring and still flying late in fall. Its green caterpillars feed on plants of the cabbage family, both in gardens and in the wild.
To reflect on
What do you love and grumble about in the same breath, and would you still keep it?