Painted Lady
(Vanessa Cardui)

Van den Hende Gardens
September 9 2003

Another friendly butterfly who seemed to be used to photographic attention. It never went further than three feet away from me while I was taking the pictures. I think the flower is called a fringed pink in English. In Japanese it's known as kawara nadeshiko, and more famously as the 'yamato nadeshiko' which represented the ideal japanese woman around WWII, i.e. feminine yet strong, chaste and devoted to her husband. The name should be familiar to fans of Matantei Loki, as Freyr makes a point of mentioning it in every episode.