070 Good from the Bitter
Hey Crown Flower, you are bitter and your sap is poisonous, yet the caterpillars of the Plain Tiger butterfly feed on your leaves.
What good grows from the parts others avoid?
What good grows from the parts others avoid?
By a dusty roadside grows a shrub with thick grey-green leaves and small crown-shaped flowers.
Break a leaf and white sap oozes out. Most animals leave it alone. But on its leaves, striped caterpillars are feeding.
What really happens
The crown flower plant is bitter, and its milky sap is poisonous to most animals.
Yet the caterpillars of the plain tiger butterfly feed on it. They take in the poison, and as butterflies they taste bad to birds. The plant's bitterness becomes their protection.
How we know: The plain tiger's use of milkweed-family plants like Calotropis is well documented by butterfly researchers.
The turn
We avoid bitter things: hard people, painful places, tough lessons.
But some of the best protection grows from what others avoid.
Three takeaways
- Bitter is not always bad.
- What others avoid can feed you.
- Your hardest experiences can become your armour.
From the bitter leaf, a butterfly.
Sweet are the uses of adversity, / Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.