What is this mystery, and what was the motive? Peter Bernhard reviews a book that teases out the strange tale.

Do you remember when Dolly Parton sang, "Love is like a butterfly, soft and gentle as a sigh"? Australian editor and journalist Walter Marsh changes that lyric in his latest book, The Butterfly Thief: Adventure, Fraud, Scotland Yard, and Australia's Greatest Museum Heist.

For the author, love is like a pinned and mislabeled butterfly: obsessive, deceptive, and criminal.

For over 300 pages of text followed by 33 pages of footnotes, Marsh shows how one man made off with more than 1,600 specimens from cabinets in the Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide museums.

The thief took what he fancied from these institutions over six years, but his thefts weren't discovered until 1947, and he had refined tastes.

The man took only the rarest of the rare, including what was then known as the flame hairstreak, Sedelmanus chlorinda subspecies barringtoniensis, an insect restricted to a few sites in the mountains of northeastern New South Wales.

Now, when a museum loses its rarest, that may also mean it has lost one or more of its type specimens.

Raven once ran the Missouri Botanic Garden and here is our very own Peter Bernhardt, who also hails from that place.

We lost botanist, author, conservationist, administrator, planner, and advisor Dr. Peter Raven on the twenty-fifth of April, twenty twenty-six.

He made such an impact on the lives of so many people, the Missouri Botanical Garden had to schedule two tributes in June.

His widow Pat and the garden administrators decided it would be best to hold events in June as the thirteenth was his birthday.

He would have been ninety.

The first service on Saturday was held to honor what you would call the public Peter Raven.

When you signed the guest book, you were offered a cough lolly and a packet of wildflower seed.

But here to review her latest offering is Peter Bernhardt.

Last year, social media, The New York Times, and public radio affiliates introduced Americans to a special trial in Gippsland, Victoria.

In fact, Wikipedia now references it as the Leongatha mushroom murders.

So now it's my turn to ask you, what have you been doing since the judge handed down his sentence in September twenty twenty-five? When you take bush walks during wet, cool seasons, do you stare at some large toadstool and wonder, "Does that belong to the same species that killed three people?" I have a remedy for your morbid curiosity.

Consider reading Mushroom Day, a story of twenty-four hours and twenty-four fungal lives by Alison Pouliot.

It's a short but friendly introduction to diversity in the kingdom fungi.

Think of it as a modern book of hours, and each hour/chapter addresses a different species.