Bertioli & Bell Hutley: Tiger Moth & Stinging Nettle
BERTIOLI | AT THYME
“Nature is our muse. It is a source of constant inspiration.”
Launching on the 20th March, the Bell Hutley & Bertioli collaboration evolved from a shared desire to tell the story of nature’s pollinators and to celebrate their magic.
Moths are often brushed aside with their home-invader connotations, however only two of the 2500 species of moth in the UK are guilty of wrecking wardrobes!
The rest play a vital role as a food source for birds and other animals as well as overnight pollinators.
They also compete on the beauty scale, coming in a fabulous array of luminous colours and entrancing shapes. The Tiger Moth is a wonderful example of this, with bright orange hindwings, hidden under a fabulous pair of animal print forewings.
Tiger Moths reside up and down the country, favouring damp meadows and open woodlands as well as gardens to call their home.
Their caterpillars eat a variety of herbaceous plants, particularly choosing the common stinging nettle. Sadly, moth populations have crashed in the last 40 years, with the Garden Tiger Moth populations in Britain dropping by 92% since 1968.
This decline has lasting impacts on the wider ecosystem, not only are moths’ important pollinators for wildflowers such as orchids, but the drop in moth populations is also connected to declines in the number of other species, such as bats and cuckoos, both of which can be found at Thyme.
Cuckoos specialise in eating hairy caterpillars, and with the Tiger Moth caterpillar lovingly named the ‘woolly bear’, it is a delicacy.
We have been inspired by the special relationship between tiger moths and the common nettle, and the fundamental role moths play in nature, to create this collection.
