Prodigal Summer

Lusa, one of the three main characters in Prodigal Summer, is an entomologist specializing in moths, and her passion for and knowledge of the creatures permeates her sections of the novel. Lusa, who researched moths—and particularly their pheromones, or “moth love” (37)—at the University of Kentucky, often associates moths with sexuality and passion. Lusa thinks of her favorite moths, Ios and lunas, living their brief lives with “romantic extravagance”—"a starving creature racing with death to scour the night for his mate” (33). After her husband’s death, Lusa dreams of her own moth lover, who initially seems human but has the “silky, pale-green wings” and “intricately branched” coremata of a moth (345).

Moths also illustrate the idea that communication can extend beyond words, a concept that’s especially relevant to Lusa and Cole’s relationship. Lusa reflects that moths “tell their love across the fields by scent,” and that without mouths, “the wrong words are impossible” (47). The words Cole and Lusa exchange are “wrong” more often than not, as they bicker and badger each other, but they share a deeper, mothlike communication. When Cole picks honeysuckle for Lusa, she receives his “wordless message,” carried “by scent across a field” (48). At the end of the novel, Lusa again sees Cole as a moth, a creature who lives only a single season, “whose only purpose was to find and call out the other side of [his] kind” (437). Like the moths calling to their mates, Cole’s purpose was to call Lusa to the Widener farm, where she’s finally found her home.

The American chestnut tree, which was destroyed when a fungal blight “stepped off a ship in some harbor” in the early 1900s (100), serves as a powerful symbol of how human interference can change an entire landscape. The American chestnut, a “majestic” tree with the “miraculous capacity to stand up to decades of weather without pressure treatment or insecticides” (128), was once an extraordinary achievement of nature, until it became clear the tree was dying out and humans destroyed the few remaining specimens.

For one of Prodigal Summer’s major characters, Garnett Walker, the American chestnut is personal: his family built their fortune on the tree, and lost it when the species died out. Garnett believes it’s his God-given purpose to resurrect the tree by cross-breeding it with the Chinese chestnut. Through his cross-breeding project, Garnett carries out a form of evolution, even as he outwardly insists on a belief in Creationism and the idea that God controls all. Thus the chestnut also serves as a way for characters to debate questions of Creationism versus evolution throughout the novel.

At the beginning of the novel, Cole and Lusa argue because Cole believes in using pesticides on honeysuckle, while Lusa does not. Cole brings Lusa some honeysuckle as a gesture of apology, and the scent of honeysuckle reminds Lusa of Cole throughout the novel. Lusa believes that Cole has told her, through the scent of this flowering weed, that “what she’d loved was here, and still might be, if she could find her way to it” (80). As the novel progresses, Lusa does realize how much she loves Zebulon and the farming life, and by the end of the book, she’s found her purpose as a farm owner. However, the honeysuckle has one more message to send: because Lusa has neglected the weed, it’s completely taken over her garage, and she has to cut it back. Lusa accepts that honeysuckle is “an invasive exotic, nothing sacred” (440), and reaches a compromise between her own convictions and Cole’s practicality: she will cut down the honeysuckle, while still knowing the plant will “persist beyond anything she could ever devise or imagine” (440).