Vintage view: Collecting and pinning

Love is like a butterfly, as Kya deLongchamps derides the age old and still popular practise of traditional collecting and pinning.

Butterfly collecting was, up to surprisingly recent times, a highly respectable, educational pastime, a feast of fresh air and a division of the macabre Victorian obsession with entomology.

Period dramas set to film, including Austen and EM Forster, feature country parsons and elegant young misses, red cheeked in straw bonnets, in pursuit of insects— bounding through the summer grasses like antelope, drifting muslin nets as large as hooker sails.