Siobhan Wilson steps from her farm office to greet visitors with a handshake. She’s slim and dark-haired with a beaming smile, and though she has lived on Maui for two decades her voice is inflected with the accent of her childhood in Oxford, England. She wears a loose white t-shirt silkscreened with her company logo: The Maui Butterfly Farm. Of all the Islands’ small-scale agricultural products, hers is the only one with six legs and four wings each. “It’s a tricky business,” she says. In the wild only 2 percent of butterfly larvae (i.e., caterpillars) survive. Thanks to Wilson’s farming techniques, the odds of survival here are 98 percent. She raises four species of butterfly: the monarch, the gulf fritillary, the citrus swallowtail and the painted lady.

People buy Wilson’s butterflies to release at weddings or other key events. (“Butterflies are a symbol of new life,” she points out.) Or they might take a chrysalis home to watch it hatch. Wilson also gives farm tours, but since she’s in Olinda, a steep, woodsy district of upper Haleakalā, access entails traveling a long stretch of dirt road through a weedy forest of eucalyptus, loquat and cane grass. No room for a school bus, so to reach schoolchildren, she takes her farm to the classroom, carrying magnifying lenses, photo cards, a “living theater” encased in white netting and caterpillars in snap-lid plastic cases.

The farm itself, as farms go, is tiny. Ten feet by twenty, a shade house full of foliage and flowers that caterpillars and butterflies like to eat. You don’t actually “tour” the farm so much as keep turning around in it, now inside the butterflies’ world. Former caterpillars flit past your nose like flying Wallendas, flaunting their beauty. Small geckos do pest control. There is sunlight and warmth and fresh air. And at night in the Olinda silence, Wilson says, you can hear the wings fluttering.

themauibutterflyfarm.com