Butterflies and flowers too follow their own, interrelated cycles. The first þowers of the year are the aconites, and the best display is in the lovely garden of the Old House by the bridge, often as early as the very first week of January. There is then the familiar succession of snowdrops, celandines, crocuses, daffodils and cowslips. Most of these early flowers are yellow, maybe the better to attract the early pollen-seekers and pollen-spreaders like the first bees and butterflies of the year. Four of our common butterflies actually hibernate over winter ­ the brimstone, peacock, comma and small tortoiseshell ­ and it's not uncommon on a sunny day in early March, or even February, to see the first yellow brimstones gliding around in a sheltered corner. Most of our other common butterflies spend the winter protected in a chrysalis and emerge in April or May when there's a greater range of flowers available, and these are later joined by some migrants from Europe like the red admiral and the painted lady, the latter of which in some years (like 1996) arrives in vast numbers flying, incredibly, all the way from Africa on those delicate wings. Regular but less common visitors include the comma, speckled wood, holly blue, meadow brown, orange tip and large skipper. Anyone with a vegetable patch also knows the common ('cabbage') white, and if you have in your garden nectar flowers like buddleia, michaelmas daisies and ice plants or larval food plants like the holly and the ivy, you may well attract some of these other beautiful species. Some 30 different butterfly species in all are found in Suffolk today. But butterflies generally are on the decline, for just the same reasons of agricultural change, habitat destruction and urban development that are threatening the flowers on which they depend and everything else in this sensitive food chain.