Welcome to my website! My goal here is to find ways to share my passion for nature. I enjoy spending time outside, observing and appreciating the animals and plants that surround me. I love gardens, but don’t love gardening. I have come to appreciate many plants that most people consider weeds.
I have studied the relationships that have developed between plants and animals, raised lots of butterflies and am saddened to have witnessed over the past ten or twelve years, how big chemical corporations have stepped up their campaigns to persuade us to poison our lawns and gardens, making them uninhabitable for the little creatures I love. The green growing plants are the original source of energy on the food chain. Everything eats plants or some other creature that has eaten plants. No plants, no insects, no songbirds, no reptiles, no mice, no rabbits, no foxes, no owls, no raptors, no wolves. And us? I guess we can eventually just eat chemicals. Is that the plan? Through my pencil and watercolor sketches and prose and poetry I have imagined many of my observations into original, fantasy and fairy tales and fun little verses. I want to appeal to children and other young at heart nature lovers like myself. Browse through my collections and find an idea that catches your fancy!
Of course, I hope you will read my books, The Way of the Meadow and In the Write Light. I hope you will join the movement to keep things natural. I would love to see the big chem companies stop and ask themselves, once in awhile, “What would Rachel Carson do?”
Velma has a BA in education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a master’s degree in Reading from Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts. Velma was a founding teacher of a charter school where she taught a multi-aged class of kindergarten, first and second graders for twenty years.
As an elementary school teacher, Velma has strived to pass a “green” message on to the next generation. She dedicated ten years to owning and operating a butterfly release company, Whispering Wings, and is a former president of the International Butterfly Breeders Association.
Velma Ann Begley resides in the seaside community of Cohasset, Massachusetts, although she considers herself more a spirit of the field and forest than of the water. She observes and records the comings and goings of the creatures of the earth, trees, and sky from the weedy gardens of her family’s antique farmhouse. Her backyard sketchbooks recount the adventures of creatures such as butterflies, hummingbirds, chipmunks, and fairies as they work hard to coexist in a dangerous world filled with cats, dogs, chemicals, and humans.
Velma exhibits with a diverse group of Cohasset artists known as Cohasset Open Studios who sponsor an art walk through the town each November. For details visit the COS website.
