“Every spring the red admirals came back to my nettle patch. Last summer I didn’t count a single one.” — Why a seventy-four-year-old Kāpiti Coast woman is letting her last 63 handmade butterfly houses go at a special price, before her workshop closes for good.

The kahukura, the New Zealand red admiral, lives in one place on earth: here. Its caterpillars eat only one plant, the stinging nettle. For most of the last century you saw it in every second garden, sunning itself on a fence on a warm October afternoon.

Ask anyone over sixty and they say the same thing. It used to be everywhere. Now they can’t remember when they last saw one.

Gaylene Corlett can. She has kept count for thirty years.

Why New Zealand’s own butterfly is going quiet

Nobody counted butterflies across New Zealand in the old days, so there are no national figures like they have overseas. But the people who study them point to the same main cause: wasps.

German wasps, common wasps and the Asian paper wasp all came here from overseas. They search nettles and swan plants leaf by leaf, find the caterpillars and carry them back to the nest. Two more tiny imported wasps lay their eggs inside the butterfly’s chrysalis.

On the Chatham Islands, 800 kilometres out to sea, those wasps never arrived. Admirals are still easy to find there. On the mainland, people now raise caterpillars under netting and let the butterflies go by hand.

But a butterfly that makes it through still needs somewhere to go when the wind gets up and the rain comes in sideways. Somewhere narrow and dry that a bird can’t reach. The kahukura even spends the winter as a grown butterfly, tucked away out of the weather. Old sheds, woodpiles, hollow trees — most modern sections have none of those left.

A well-made butterfly house is one simple thing you can still do in an ordinary Kiwi garden. But only if it is built properly.

Twenty-eight springs in an old garage at the back of Ōtaki

Gaylene Corlett’s workshop is an old single garage behind a 1950s weatherboard house on the edge of Ōtaki. A corrugated-iron roof, a bench along one wall, a radio on the windowsill. Through the open door you can see the Tararua Range. On a clear day you can smell the sea, three kilometres away.

She is seventy-four. Her late husband Trevor was a joiner in Levin for forty-one years. The teardrop shape is his. “Trevor said a house should shed the rain the way a raindrop runs down a window,” Gaylene says. “And it should hang still in a nor’wester. On this coast, that matters.”

In 1998 Trevor cut her a set of plywood templates. She has built more than 2,200 houses with them since. Every one has the same slots and the same little sand dish at the bottom. Each house takes her about four hours, start to finish.

The nettle patch she never cut down

Behind the garage is a patch of stinging nettle that Gaylene has left alone since 1995. The neighbours thought she’d lost the plot. “That’s the kahukura’s nursery,” she says. “No nettle, no red admirals. Simple as that.”

Every Sunday afternoon from October to April she counts the butterflies in her garden. The counts go into school exercise books on the shelf above the bench. In the summer of 1997 she wrote down thirty-one red admirals in one afternoon.

“Last summer I didn’t count a single one. Not one, all season.” She puts the house down. “You notice a thing like that.”

Why most butterfly houses hang there empty for years

“People buy a butterfly house, hang it up, and nothing ever comes,” Gaylene says. “It’s nearly always the house.”

The slots are too wide, so sparrows move in. Or too narrow, so nothing gets in at all. There is no dish of damp sand, which butterflies need. Or the house is painted and still smells of it. “Lovely in the shop,” she says. “Empty all summer. Empty the summer after.”

Gaylene’s houses are different in four ways. She worked each one out over twenty-eight springs.

• “The Raindrop Line” Trevor’s teardrop shape. Rain runs straight off it, and the wind slides around it, so the house doesn’t spin or bang against the tree. Gaylene’s oldest house has hung on the same feijoa tree since 1999. Same hook. Never touched.
• “The 18-Millimetre Slot” The slots are cut just under two centimetres wide. A red admiral can crawl in with its wings folded. A sparrow can’t. “A millimetre out,” Gaylene says, “and either nothing moves in or the birds do.”
• “The Sand Dish” A small metal dish at the bottom, filled with damp sand. Butterflies drink water and minerals from it. For them it isn’t a treat, it’s something they need. Almost no butterfly house sold in New Zealand has one.
• “The Bare Timber Rule” Plain natural timber. No paint, no stain, no varnish. Butterflies stay away from a chemical smell, even if everything else is right. The back opens without tools, so you can brush it out once a year and top up the sand.

What it looks like when it works

This is what she builds them for. One sunny afternoon, three different butterflies on one small wooden house.

Sixty-three houses. Then the garage door shuts for good.

It started with the washing line. Two winters ago Gaylene couldn’t reach up to peg out the sheets. Then she couldn’t hold her arms steady over the bench for the last cut on a slot. The specialist in Wellington was kind and very clear: torn tendons in both shoulders. At seventy-four, an operation wouldn’t put them right.

“The saw still cuts,” Gaylene says. “My arms just won’t stay where I put them. And the last millimetre is the whole job.”

Trevor died three years ago. Her daughter Kirsty has finished a granny flat behind her house in Rolleston, outside Christchurch. Gaylene moves in January. Her granddaughter Isla is eight and already counts butterflies with her over the phone.

What she leaves behind can’t go in a box. The smell of fresh-cut pine first thing in the morning. The tūī in the kōwhai while the radio plays. Trevor’s templates, worn smooth where his hands held them.

Sixty-three houses are left on the bench. None will be made again. Trevor’s templates are staying in Ōtaki. When the last box goes out, the workshop is closed.

Anyone who orders one now gets one of the very last houses Gaylene will ever make.

She could have asked double. She didn’t.

Once it was clear the workshop was closing, the question was simple: what happens to the sixty-three houses still on the bench? The granny flat in Rolleston has no room for them. Handing them out one by one at the Ōtaki market would never get them to the gardens that need them.

Kirsty put her in touch with Craft Folk, a small shop for handmade pieces that takes care of the packing and posting. The price was Gaylene’s decision. Not a collector’s price. A price for someone with a real garden who will really hang one up.

“I made them for the butterflies,” she says. “Not to sit on a shelf in somebody’s hallway.”

Money was never why she built them, and it isn’t why she is selling them now. She wants a kahukura on somebody’s fence next October. A monarch on somebody’s swan plant in February. Her work carrying on in other people’s gardens after her hands have stopped.

“I checked with a torch” — what Gaylene’s customers say

Before they are gone — what you need to know

Spring is the window. The admirals that slept through the winter are out now, looking for shelter from the wind.
What is still on Gaylene’s bench is all there is.

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