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Dallas nurse uses magic of butterfly’s transformation to give hope to cancer patients
Ben Torres/Special Contributor A newly emerged monarch must wait for its wings to dry before it flies off in search of its first meal. 1 of 10
AText Size By PENNY RUEKBERG
Special Contributor
Published 20 July 2011 04:16 PM
Related itemsAs Erin Prendergast gardens, she closely monitors the butterflies who visit the plants she sets out expressly for them: flowers that provide sustaining nectar and foliage that feeds the caterpillars.
After she witnessed repeatedly the stages that a butterfly moves through during its short life, Prendergast’s personal and professional lives unexpectedly merged.
A registered nurse for more than 15 years, Prendergast, 46, works at the Peggy A. Bell Women’s Diagnostic and Breast Center at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. She helps women who have been told of abnormal mammograms and who have been sent to the center for further tests. The nurse recognized a parallel between the transformations of a butterfly’s life and that of her patients.
“I read a Community Voices essay in The Dallas Morning News about love and loss that used a butterfly as a symbol of life,” Prendergast says. “And I realized that when a woman has a breast cancer diagnosis, it can feel as if everything she knows is over. But sometimes, like the butterfly, she may simply be moving through another life stage, evolving into a different woman.”
As a child in rural Iowa, Prendergast learned to garden from her mother and grandmother. “My grandmother always had gardens. She grew incredible peonies, and canned and put up vegetables,” Prendergast says.
Three years ago, Prendergast embarked on Dallas County’s master gardener training program. She wanted to learn about native Texas plants and to become qualified to share that knowledge with others.
“We took wonderful trips, like an expedition to the Texas wetlands in Seagoville,” Prendergast says of the instruction. “I met ornithologists, entomologists and all different kinds of people bound by a love for gardening.”
During the master gardener program, Prendergast created a garden for butterflies at her home in Prestonwood Estates West. She had already cultivated a large vegetable garden of tomatoes, zucchini and other summer squash, as well as containers of herbs and a large rose garden.
With two adolescent sons who also used the outdoor spaces, however, Prendergast had run out of room for more garden. She needed a full-sun setting and space for the specific plants that butterflies need to thrive: nectar plants as food sources for butterflies, and host plants for the butterflies to lay their eggs on and for the resulting caterpillars to feed on.
“I found a strip in the side yard where my boys practice throwing the football,” Prendergast says.
“When they came home from school and saw that I had taken over part of their play space, they were not happy with me. But as the butterflies began hatching, they loved it. They still run inside to tell me when a butterfly hatches so I can come see it.”
Milkweed, a host plant for monarchs, is a prominent perennial in Prendergast’s garden. She purchases Mexican milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) and white-veined Dutchman’s pipe, also called pipevine (Aristolochia fimbriata), from Texas Discovery Gardens in Fair Park. (The museum holds semiannual sales that draw butterfly gardeners and native plant enthusiasts. The next sale is Nov. 5.) She also cultivates passionvine (Passiflora) to host gulf fritillary caterpillars and dill, fennel and rue for various swallowtails.
The nurse and mother also is an avid amateur photographer; butterflies sipping nectar from her flowers are a frequent subject. The two hobbies, she says, relieve the emotional stress of her job at the imaging center.
The joy that comes from butterfly gardening combined with the nurse’s persistent reflections about metamorphosis — in life and in nature — eventually emerged as a business idea as well as a way to help cancer patients. She solicited the help of the Texas Health Presbyterian Foundation and asked to donate her photography to accent one of its breast biopsy rooms. The photographs detail the life cycle of a monarch butterfly: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly.
Prendergast also began teaching butterfly gardening to schoolchildren, beginning at Good Shepherd Episcopal School when her boys were students there. She teaches about compost, a butterfly’s life cycle and, with her colorful tulle butterfly wings affixed to her back, weaves in age-appropriate messages about cancer.
Spreading the magic around
Last October, the nurse launched a business called On Butterflies Wings. Her sister, Maureen Conway, 52, of Plano joined her to teach many of the school classes and to help develop new products.
The company composes and sells butterfly baskets containing a live chrysalis, easy-to-grow seeds and instructions for a butterfly garden, and inspirational note cards featuring Prendergast’s photography. She raises caterpillars to chrysalis stage in her backyard for the baskets, but if nature does not cooperate, Prendergast buys live chrysalises from a local butterfly farmer.
Prendergast also makes and sells what she calls Earth’s Truffles, seed-embedded balls of clay (smaller than a pingpong ball) made by children who take part in her classroom lessons. Seed balls are made from organic compost, dry clay powder, water and seeds from the butterfly and hummingbird blend sold by Wildseed Farms in Fredericksburg. The latest addition to their offerings is a line of butterfly-inspired jewelry designed and made by Plano metalsmith DeAnna Cochran. The company donates a portion of its profits to the breast-care program fund of the Texas Health Presbyterian Foundation.
The words imprinted on one of Prendergast’s photos at the Bell breast center succinctly summarize the caregiver’s expressions of support: “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.”
Penny Ruekberg is a Richardson freelance writer.
garden@dallasnews.com
Where to buy
Find On Butterflies Wings products at retailers listed below or online at www.onbutterflieswings.org. Prices begin at $7.95 for a decorative box of four Earth Truffles seed balls. Not all products are available at every location. The shelf life is short for the butterfly baskets; to ensure delivery for a special occasion, most retailers allow customers to order them in advance.
All About You, Plano
Apples to Zinnias, Dallas
Brumley Gardens, Dallas
Nan Lee Jewelry, McKinney
Texas Discovery Gardens at Fair Park, Dallas
Trinity River Audubon Center, Dallas
Twist Power Yoga, Dallas
Women’s Health Boutique, Dallas
Who visits the garden?
Butterfly species that Prendergast has spotted:
Gulf fritillary
Eastern black swallowtail
Giant swallowtail
Pipevine swallowtail
Monarch
Cabbage white
Red admiral
Common buckeye
Red-spotted purple
Pearl crescent
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RuthACook
10:45 AM on 7/22/2011
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Nature possesses such wisdom. Think about the stories Jesus told about birds, flowers, planting, harvesting, wheat, chaff, rain….Lovely article and help for all of us.
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IttyBittyFoodies
9:53 AM on 7/22/2011
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Thank you for this piece. My mother in law uses the butterfly metamorphosis for her mental health patients too and it’s very inspiring.
