Butterfly Mama: Fashion Photographer Raises Over 1,000 Monarch Butterflies, With Young Daughters’ Help

Elle Muliarchyk Johnson with her two daughters at their butterfly sanctuary in Chattanooga, Tenn. (JR Nolan at Shot Rite Photography)

Every time Elle Muliarchyk Johnson watches a butterfly emerge, she remembers marveling at the loud thumping of her daughter’s heart: “Something so tiny and so delicate, and it’s pushing so, so hard inside her chest to grow and to become the beautiful butterfly that this human being will become. It was this most incredible moment, this incredible connection of the universe,” she said.

“Right at the stage when they need to come out of the chrysalis, … the butterfly has to have this incredible strength to push, to make the chrysalis burst. … We have to work so hard to achieve our dreams and to burst through this chrysalis,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s journey to save monarch butterflies began as a love letter to her daughter Henley. When she found out that the monarch butterfly was becoming endangered due to habitat destruction, she decided she had to do something about it. She bought 250 milkweed plants and started growing them to feed the gentle creatures.

Butterfly Dreams

Over seven years, in a milkweed-filled garden in Greenwich, Connecticut, she and her children have tended to about 1,000 butterflies.

During the summer, after putting Henley to bed at night, she would take out her photography lights and put them in the garden so she could work into the wee hours, combing through the plants to get rid of the aphids that swarm them.

(Courtesy of Elle Muliarchyk Johnson)

Johnson, a fashion photographer who was used to setting up 1,000-watt lights for glamorous photoshoots for Vogue and W Magazine, now had new models. Henley, since she knew how to sit up, would help her mom with removing the aphids. After moving to Chattanooga, Tennessee, Johnson set up milkweed plants again to do the same butterfly-raising. Her second daughter Grace started to assist Mom as well, with mixing the soil.

The project reignited Johnson’s creativity, which she had felt she was losing as her work moved away from fashion editorials and toward ad campaigns.

Motherhood blew that creativity wide open. “When we’re children, everything’s a possibility. There is no ‘no’ in this world; everything is possible. And then slowly, our culture makes us shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink into a smaller person with fewer possibilities in our heads. It makes you have limiting core beliefs,” she explained.

“What children do is, they break all these core beliefs and break everything that you’ve known before and get you down to this stage of infancy and possibility. Everything that you knew, it just explodes and goes upside down.”

The Power of Motherhood

Johnson thought she’d be back to traveling around the world for her photoshoots soon after childbirth. But when taking care of Henley turned into a full-time endeavor, she found new ways to express her creativity and lifelong passion for storytelling.

She thought back to her own childhood growing up in Belarus, on the cusp of Eastern and Western Europe. It was one filled with stories and legends from different traditions—Greek and Norse mythology, Eastern European folktales, Chinese folklore, and Indian epics—that fired up her imagination and ignited a love of stories. “The characters are so powerful and so relatable,” she said.

Johnson and Henley’s sketches for their children’s book. (Courtesy of Elle Muliarchyk Johnson)

She wanted the same for her daughters, Henley, now 7, and Grace, 3. Johnson reads storybooks to them for hours on end; they in turn love to play pretend, embodying the characters they’ve read about while doing their daily routines. Henley in particular has a penchant for telling punny jokes.

One day, when Henley was about 2, she thought of a clever play on words: What underwear does a zebra wear? A bra! She had more: What is a horse’s favorite drink? Lemo-NEIGH-d! What does grass say to the nice gardener who waters it? GRASS-ias!

These inspired Johnson to create a children’s book based on Henley’s jokes. Working with an illustrator from Ukraine whom Johnson discovered online, she and Henley published “What Underwear Does a Zebra Wear?” in 2018. It ranked number 1 in the children’s category on Amazon.com when it was first released. “With the children’s book—I felt like finally, I found a way to marry my passion for folklore and stories and storytelling,” Johnson said. She donated about 500 copies to charities, schools, and the Memphis St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

(Courtesy of Elle Muliarchyk Johnson)

Being a mother is the most difficult thing Johnson’s ever done—“astronomically harder than any kind of hardship you can imagine as a newcomer in New York City,” she said, recalling her days of moving to the city in search of modeling work, hoping to earn enough money to pay for tuition at her dream school, Columbia University. Famed fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier spotted her in a cafe and took her to a modeling agency. That sparked her early modeling career—which wasn’t as glamorous as she initially thought. The wages were meager, which meant she often had little to eat.

Those hard days pale in comparison to the responsibility of motherhood. “Knowing that you’re responsible for the heart and body and soul … of another human being, … [and] every time you think you’re helping them, you actually mess up and you make it worse—it’s like your heart is being ripped apart. And so having gone through that, it makes you so tough and makes you feel like if you’ve gone through this, then you can do anything. I can be like Atlas that is holding the Earth,” she said. “You’re more powerful than any possible challenge in this world.”

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.