Night and Day

18 July 2025

July. Hot weather brings out the black moths. Outside, they linger over the brambles as dusk falls, sometimes resting on the warm panes of the greenhouse. Inside, one finds its way into the hall and clings to the curtain by the front door. They defy identification. Outside, when we try to photograph them, the images are too blurry in the moonlight. Inside, the lone moth either taps against the lamp or hides in the curtain folds.

As the days pass, my inability to name them first intrigues me then leads me to symbolism. A black moth is bad luck and foretells death … A black moth is good luck and promises inner wisdom … Dissatisfied with this inconsistency, I resort to story and think of them as smaller cousins of the black moths of Mirkwood. While Bilbo’s moths are as big as your hand, these are more like the butterflies he finds at the tops of the trees – velvety black with no clear markings.[i]

They appear night after night, flying lower than the bats but on similar erratic trajectories in the thick, honeysuckle air. Then the weather cools and the moths disappear.

After two days of grey cloud and intermittent rain, we find the indoor moth again. Slower and tattered, in the daylight it is clearly dark brown and not black. I snatch an image, and the moth is quickly identified as a Feathered Gothic – a species named after its ornate, repeated motifs reminiscent of Gothic architecture.

Even in her poor condition, her markings are exquisite. With her wings folded, she appears to be wearing a fur collar on a cloak of intricately patterned brocade. Fine white lines divide the design into segments of darker and lighter browns. The wings are finished with a lacy frill. Re-made as a dress, this outfit would be worthy of royalty - at the very least it would turn every head at the ball. She is easy to catch, and I return her to the garden. Blinking against the light, she shuffles off to hide under the hedge, and I fear she has had her last moondance.

In the border, white butterflies are enjoying a sundance on the Verbena bonariensis. They are plain, Small Whites with green veins and a single dot on each wing, and they look like ingenues compared to the sophistication of the Feathered Gothic. I am suddenly struck by the way that the complexity of the moth’s design was entirely hidden by darkness – I was only able to see it because she (or more likely he, as the males are particularly attracted to light) was lured in by the lamp.

Feathered Gothics are common and feed on grasses – even ornamentals,[ii] which probably explains how they found their way into our garden. Of course, the black moths that haunted the brambles on hot nights may have been a different species, but unless the high temperatures return, we shall never know.

Either way, we will remember this as the summer of the black moths. The summer of heatwaves and droughts. Of staying out late and moon-bathing in the warm dark.

A quiet time, before the rains began.

[i] Tolkien, J.R.R. ‘The Hobbit’ (1937).

[ii] Butterfly Conservation, ‘Feathered Gothic’, 2025. Found at: https://butterfly-conservation.org/moths/feathered-gothic . Accessed: 18.07.2025.