Eliza O’Toole is a local Laurel Prize nominated poet working near our Arger Fen nature reserve in the south of Suffolk. Her work closely echoes her relationship with the landscape and natural world, drawing on her life experiences and how she has observed nature’s abundance decline since childhood. 

Eliza has created a special edition chapbook (a paperbound collection of poetry or stories) focused on the UK’s native moth species. Titled Red Fifty Five, the book draws attention to the 55 species of moths in the UK which are listed as Critically Endangered, Endangered, and Vulnerable in the Red Data Book. 

55 copies of the Chapbook are available for sale via our website shop, with all proceeds helping fund our vital conservation work in Suffolk. 

We’ve sat down with Eliza to discuss her book and discover more about her relationship with Suffolk’s Wild Landscapes. 

1. What inspired Red Fifty Five?

I miss moths. 

When I was a child, the summer and autumn were full of moths lekking (a mating behaviour where males gather in groups to display for mates).  In those days, after harvest, fields were fired, the stubble burned and the air was full of moths drawn to the flames. They caught fire, flared and went up in smoke. The air flickered with the bright sparkings of dying moths. Those images have never left me. 

Despite stubble burning and indiscriminate pesticide spraying, moths were still much more abundant thirty years ago than today.  

Car windscreens would need to be scraped clean when travelling by night owing to the extent of lepidopterous casualties. Moths were creatures that I took for granted as a child, those myth makers filled the dusk sky. 

Who could forget seeing bats taking moths on the wing, or swallows with beaks full of them for feeding their young, or dragonflies capturing them mid-flight. There are so few moths by comparison today. The decline in such a short time is scary. 

So I think it is that huge and rapid change in abundance that first inspired Red Fifty Five.

2.    How has living in the Suffolk landscape informed your work?

Suffolk is not a romantic scenery, it is a working rural landscape, most often under the plough since ancient times, and it is a way of life. That is what is at the heart of all of my books which are deeply grounded in the way of this land. 

Following in a long line of artists and writers similarly affected by its plough lines, luminous light and rural green, I feel as a part of it, compelled to record or map this place by writing the truth of my experience, day by day, season by season, year by year, before this rural way of life and the resulting landscape, cherished over centuries, is lost like moths to a whole range of changes fundamentally affecting it.

3. Why moths? 

Because they are amazing! Did you know that moths are estimated to be over 250 million years old. They flew with dinosaurs, are older than nectar-bearing flowering plants and people. 

And many moths only feed on one single type of plant, for example cinnabar moths feed almost exclusively on ragwort. If you kill all the ragwort, there will be an extinction of cinnabar moths. Elephant hawk-moths, which are bright pink and green, replicate the colours of their main food plants which are rosebay willowherb and honeysuckle. Moths are brilliant at camouflage. Grow these plants and the moths will find them. 

They are also a vital link in the food chain. Without moth caterpillars to feed baby birds, there would be no song birds, no passerines (around 6,000 species of birds are classified as passerines) and the trees would be silent.

4.How has the chapbook been created to echo the poems and messaging inside?

That is an excellent question. Thank you for spotting that there is something special in the design of the chapbook.  

The red cover is the colour of warning, of danger and is the colour of the ‘Red data book’ which lists the moths of the UK which are Critically Endangered, Endangered or Vulnerable. 

The black end papers reflect the dark of the night in which moths fly. The images of moths are taken from a Victorian moth book and they are reimagined as fading out much like the watercolour images in the Victorian moth book, and of some species of moths in reality. 

The binding is singer sewn in black thread, and this re-enacts the pinned, folding-out-flat of the wings of displayed dead moths, a Victorian collecting habit that still persists. 

The black thread together with black end papers are also a symbol of mourning for so many lost and missing moths. 

And finally, the black foiled text on the back cover shimmers when turned in the light, just like the scales that make up moth wings on a moonlit night.

If you would like to own a copy of this very special edition collection of poetry, you can purchase your copy on our web shop. All proceeds will help support our vital conservation work in Suffolk, including habitat management and creation which benefit moth populations.

We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Eliza O’Toole for compiling her work into this beautiful book and for sharing it with us.