The Butterflies and Moths of Teneriffe

In the winter of 1892, a woman named A.E. Holt White arrived on the island of Tenerife not as a tourist but as a invalid seeking refuge from the grey English climate. What she found among the volcanic landscapes and laurel forests was a revelation: an island teeming with Lepidoptera unlike any she had encountered at home. This book is the fruit of her patient winter spent netting butterflies and moths in the Canaries, her trembling hand rendering them in watercolors before the light failed. Holt White catalogs twenty-nine species of butterfly and thirty-four of moth, each entry capturing not just anatomical details but the living habits of creatures seldom documented in English natural history. The illustrations glow with the particular intensity of Victorian scientific art, rendered by someone who watched these insects daily, who knew the precise hour a species took to the wing. For anyone drawn to the strange romance of early naturalists, to the vanished world of remote island collecting, or simply to beautiful hand-drawn butterflies, this volume preserves something precious: a moment of quiet obsession on a subtropical island, captured in ink and pigment before the century turned.