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Reviewed by Paul Zietsman for Readers' Favorite
Bringing Butterflies Home: Gardening with Native Plants to Heal Our Yards and Ourselves is a wonderful environmental book by Elizabeth White Olsen. Elizabeth's passion is butterflies and how to cultivate her garden and living space to bring more of nature into her life. She teaches readers about the importance of planting native plants in their gardens, which serve as food for butterflies in the form of nectar as well as host plants where these magical creatures lay their eggs. Not only does it serve butterflies, but it can create a small yet complete ecosystem in one's garden, home to plants, flowers, birds, bees, and other miraculous insects. Bringing Butterflies Home teaches readers the process of creating such spaces step-by-step. It instilled in me a newfound appreciation for nature and its ability to bounce back given the right circumstances, as noted by the author.
Elizabeth White Olsen attributes her success in the writing of Bringing Butterflies Home to her love for the subject, namely butterflies, and not to the desire to write a book. She praises God for His works of wonder, and has witnessed first-hand how nature, sometimes mysteriously, but always magically, flourishes when humankind is not in its way. Elizabeth speaks excitedly and with obvious passion about caterpillars and butterflies and native plants, which are, in the case of butterflies, divided into host plants and nectar plants. Bringing Butterflies Home gave me a new way to connect to God by wanting to notice His everyday tiny miracles. I thought back to three decades ago when, on my grandmother's farm in South Africa, we would see no less than thirty-odd butterflies of different species in her garden, and it got me believing that this magic can be reclaimed.
