Rita Venable, a member of the Wild Ones Middle Tennessee Chapter, has spent decades championing butterflies and native gardening. Venable combines humor, science, and hands-on experience to inspire gardeners to plant native species and create wildlife-friendly habitats. Her approachable storytelling, from tips on butterfly behavior to insights on native plants, has made her a beloved voice in conservation and nature communication.
Rita Venable’s 2014 book Butterflies of Tennessee is a field and garden guide with a rabid regional following. The guide illustrates all aspects of butterfly life, presented in a high-quality, visually joyful way with color-coding and photos from front to back. But best of all it’s funny. Venable gleefully shares short stories and facts, such as the Great Purple Hairstreak’s hostplant, Mistletoe, is “usually harvested in the Southeast by shooting it out of trees.” And that, despite their name, “hoary” or grey/silver butterflies don’t get senior citizen discounts. The guide’s advice for those who fail fad diets is to increase exercise by pursuing the Meadow Fritillary. In a world of dry field guides, it reads like talking with a smart, funny friend.
“Scientists get in the weeds a lot. I think we need to find new ways of explaining things that make sense to the new generation- find new ways to talk to them,” said Venable.
To Venable’s thinking, breaking, or at least shaking up the rules of science communication, is a means to recruit a new generation to the idea of native planting and becoming stewards of declining species, like butterflies.
“Young people are moving here (to Nashville) from all over. Newcomers want to know how to garden here, and WildOnes has been so effective in communicating the native plant message,” she said.
If Venable is any guide, key ingredients for science communicators are fearlessness combined with dogged nerdiness and exposure to great mentors.
“My first butterfly field trip ever, I had gone out to Colorado. I didn’t know a soul out there. One of the guides, his name sounded kind of solid, but I didn’t recognize it,” Venable recalled. She later learned Bob Pyle was a celebrated butterfly expert, writer of the Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Butterflies, and founder of the Xerces Society.
“He inspired. He just had a way. He was really funny and very knowledgeable and explained things, even politically edgy things, very well. You’d be surprised how much controversy there is in the Butterfly world,” she said with a smile.
Jeffrey Glassberg, founder of the North American Butterfly Association, was her primary mentor. He didn’t believe in capturing, pinning or collecting butterflies. He taught her the basics of gardening for butterflies, photographing plants and butterflies (no pinning or collecting), and empowering others to find butterflies on their own.
A graduate in wildlife management, Venable took that knowledge and blazed her own trail to communications and authorship while attending field trips with the Tennessee Native Plant Society and conducting butterfly surveys for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. She would take her trusty camera, macro lens, and audio recorder to hot spots of native plant-rich habitat bursting with butterflies and record images and information.
“This really was the early days of cell phones, and GPS was just starting to come into play at that time. I did not have a lot of field trip buddies at all, so those two tools are very empowering for a woman in the field by herself.”
Weathering her share of lightning storms in fields, snake encounters, dropping her camera in a pond and flat tires on empty backroads, Venable says she learned fearlessness from her father who had a habit of starting things he was interested in but had no business doing, then finishing them well. She gathered tens of thousands of photos of butterflies and had carefully recorded and filed reliable information for each and every one. By the end of the 2010s she realized she had enough for a book. With her ever-supportive husband, Phil, she found a publisher and produced the Butterflies of Tennessee field guide.
Now, more than 10 years after the publication of Butterflies of Tennessee, she is winding down book sales, but has continued promoting native planting throughout the region. She hosted several segments of “Volunteer Gardener,” a PBS garden show featuring local native home gardens, and became an early member of the Wild Ones Middle Tennessee Chapter. Now a grandmother, Venable is re-living those feelings of awe she experienced as a youth when she first noticed a yellow butterfly on the little garden plot her mother gave over to her experimental plantings. On hikes with the kids, she can barely hide her enthusiastic approval of a young guide describing the Silver-spotted Skipper’s secret weapon for defense: “They shoot their poop a distance that, for us, would be like the length of a football field or more, to keep predators off their path. I knew that was just gold. I thought this was gonna grab their attention in a good way.”
Venable is now a mentor herself, catalyzing a new kind of metamorphosis- the blossoming of science and nature communication made more approachable and entertaining. For her next project, Venable says she would love to launch a home makeover-style program, but for home gardens transforming into native plant habitats.
“There is a hunger for real face time with native gardeners. If more people could begin with maybe just a little area of their yard, they would see for themselves that if you win, we all win.”
Staff Note: Butterflies of Tennessee is now sold out, and there are no plans for another printing in the foreseeable future. Veneble has published numerous articles and photographs in literary publications, newspapers, and magazines, including American Butterflies, American Gardener, Backpacker, Discover the Outdoors, and National Wildlife Online. Rita was editor of Butterfly Gardener, a publication of the North American Butterfly Association. Learn more about Rita Venable and her work at ritavenable.com.
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