18/05/2026
Have you spotted the delicate cuckoo flower, also known as lady’s smock, blooming in damp meadows and along paths this spring? 🌸
This native wildflower plays a vital role in the lifecycle of the orange tip butterfly. Female orange tips lay their eggs on cuckoo flowers, and when the caterpillars hatch, they feed on the developing seed pods.
Our specimen of the orange tip butterfly comes from the collection of James Joseph Francis Xavier King (1855–1933), a Scottish entomologist, artist, librarian, and lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. King joined the Glasgow Natural History Society at just sixteen and later became Librarian there. He also taught at the Glasgow School of Art, where one of his pupils was the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Over his lifetime he assembled an extraordinary collection of around 500,000 British insect specimens, along with bird eggs and natural history books, much of which was later gifted to the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow.
The cuckoo flower specimen was collected in May 1886 along Inverkip Road by John Ballantyne, a member of the Greenock Natural History Society.
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