Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) Part 2: Botanist and Ardent Environmentalist

Beatrix Potter is a very impressive woman. She lived many lives in the span of one lifetime, constantly reinventing herself according to her latest interests and opportunities.

When she became a landowner in the north, she was hands-on with her farms. She planted gardens, overhauled the buildings, learned how to raise livestock and hired the best shepherds she could find to care for and help her breed Herdwick sheep.

When she became the owner of multiple operating farms, she visited them all frequently keeping close track of the operations including the health of the families living there. She became a very important and integral part of the community of the Lake District, even hiring a permanent nurse for the area, providing her with a car and housing.

Read our previous post: Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) Part 1: A Savvy Businesswoman with a Fierce Love for the Wild

Beatrix Potter the Botanist and Naturalist

Even before she began illustrating books, Beatrix Potter was interested in botany and what many today think of as science. At the time, Potter was called a naturalist. This was before the era of the professional scientist. In this time of the naturalist, and amateur scientist, there was a place for women, so many of them took it up.

“By the early 1890s Beatrix’s interests as an artist and naturalist had converged on fungi, and, to a lesser degree, on fossils. Such enthusiasms were typical of the Victorian craze for natural history which, beginning earlier in the century, affected everyone from aristocrat to artisan. Women in particular were drawn to the study of insects, shells, ferns, fossils and fungi, and to their naming, classification, collection and frequently their illustration. Like many of her contemporaries, Beatrix was first drawn to natural history as a way to relieve the boredom that beset affluent Victorians, and for the measure of  personal freedom it brought. Certainly her initial efforts were amateur, but she enjoyed drawing under the microscope and she had certain undefined artistic ambitions that accompanied her exploration of the natural world”(Lear 76).

Potter was a very ambitious person. Anything she became interested in quickly became a passion and something she excelled at. Her forays into the forests became longer and her sketches turned into serious study.

“Unlike insects or shells or even fossils, fungi also guaranteed an autumn foray into fields and forests, where she could go in her pony cart without being encumbered by family or heavy equipment”(Lear 78).

In the winters she lived in London and, lacking live subjects, went to the Natural History Museum to sketch fossils, bones and other specimens. Years earlier, while spending her summers at Dalguise, in Scotland, she had met Charlie McIntosh, a well-respected naturalist. She engaged him to help her improve her fungi drawings, to consult with him on discoveries she made in the forest, sharing their location and her own observations.

He took his role as mentor seriously and gave her good feedback, especially helping her learn how to sketch the gills.

Through her research, illustrations, observations and work with McIntosh, Potter learned much about fungi, deducing that they reproduce using spores —something that was unknown and not accepted until years later. She found and identified a particular rare pine cone fungus, ‘old man of the woods’. She also guessed at the underground mycelial web.

At age twenty-eight, when she attempted to have her research taken seriously by the powers that be at Kew Gardens, she was brushed off as an amateur and even less, a woman. Their reactions toward her infuriated Potter and even led her to say she suspected the director, Thiselton-Dyer, was “something of a mysogynist”(Lear 122).

Nevertheless she submitted a paper,  ‘On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae‘.  This was presented to a meeting of the Linnean Society on 1 April 1897 and read by one of the members.

“The establishment scientists simply discounted her research and ignored her conclusions. They were later proved wrong. That they were antagonistic to her as a woman and as an amateur goes without saying, and their bad manners account for the Linnean Society’s official ‘apology’ for the sins of historic sexism a century later”(125).

On the Linnean organization’s website they state:

“Indeed, the spores of Tremellain her paintings were not formally described until some 45 years later—she was illustrating what other people did not even see, and she was continually asking questions in her letters to McIntosh, especially regarding the possibility of intermediate species”(https://linnean.org).

Potter was discouraged from continuing her study of fungi. We don’t know how her life may have been different had they taken her seriously or had she been able to become a professional scientist. This rejection led her to a career as a writer and illustrator. Eventually she ended up back in science in the fields of agriculture, horticulture, and ecology in her life as a farmer and conservationist.

Potter produced over 350 illustrations of fungi.

Beatrix Potter and The National Trust

Another friend and mentor whom Potter was greatly  influenced by was Hardwicke Rawnsley, a founding member of the National Trust.

“The National Trust was based on the radical legal premise that a non-profit entity could hold title to land or buildings as trustee in perpetuity for the use and enjoyment of the entire nation. The legislation establishing the Trust  was a landmark in the British preservation movement. The trust was officially a charity, entirely supported by individual membership and the donations of property. Rawnsley became secretary of the new organization, a post for which he was ideally suited and which provided him the perfect pulpit from which to champion the unique mission of the trust”(Lear 140).

Through Rawnsley she not only became interested in conservation but also schooled in how to be an effective proponent.

At age thirty-nine, Potter bought her first farm, Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey in the Lake District. Hill Top Farm was a working farm with tenants. For the first few years Potter could only be there part-time, since she was still obligated to care for her parents. She made sure to renovate the farm buildings to her liking and create herself a place to live and work when she was there. Then she set out to get to know the workings of the farm .

When it became available she purchased the farm across the road, Castle Farm, where she would later live in Castle Cottage with her husband, William Heelis. She continued to buy land surrounding her property and even farms beyond. She worried about development and tourism overtaking the land and way of life. She wanted the land to remain undeveloped, preserved as farms engaged in the indigenous farming methods. She went on to buy fifteen farms in all and left them all to the National Trust with the expressed desire that many of them continue the practice of fell (hill) farming and the breeding of Herdwick sheep.

Her love of farm life came through in her books written and illustrated while there: The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907), The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908) and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (1908).

Soon Beatrix Potter became local to place, calling the Lake District her home and leaving an indelible stamp on it.

Beatrix Potter the Feminist

Potter remade herself in the Lake District but it also seems she was finally able to be her true self.

She hosted the Girl Guides on her property every summer, offering city girls the chance to be in the wild and learn from it. Every year they camped on her property. She visited them, told stories and enjoyed their company. She was very generous, even paying for many of her nieces and other young women’s educations.

In her biography of Beatrix Potter, Linda Lear states more than a few times that Potter did not support the Suffragettes or their movement. Lear does not go into detail as to why, only that she thought them ‘silly’.

It’s often jarring to find statements like these in biographies of women who have broken so many glass ceilings and achieved so much in a time women were allowed so little, but we must remember a word that is so often evoked these days when talking about activism and movements: nuance.

Like Elizabeth Gaskell, Potter was a Unitarian and many of what we may call feminist beliefs were built into this worldview, most especially equity and education for women. Clearly Potter believed in equal rights for women as she fought for hers all her life.

Potter’s parents’ tight restrictions on her behavior may have caused her to project that out onto the Suffragettes, who were being a bit wild and rambunctious in public, something considered unattractive and unappealing to the upper-class folks of 19th century Britain.

As she matured, Beatrix allowed herself to become a farmer who wore clothing her mother disapproved of, let her teeth fall out and even fought openly with men in power. I wonder if she hadn’t changed her mind by then. Perhaps the Suffragettes scared her on some level because she knew better than anyone that she was actually one of them.

“Beatrix was a difficult woman for some traditionally raised women to relate to. She was socially indifferent, even eccentric. She cared little for fashion or society. She was also very wealthy, a woman of substantial property, already enhanced by William’s knowledge and skills, and a writer and an artist who was earnestly making herself into a countrywoman. She dressed as a farmer and could be found walking to and from the ferry, dressed in a practical workmanlike way, happier caring for her farm animals, working in the garden, reviewing livestock at the local agricultural show, than offering tea”(Lear 252).

Finding camaraderie with American women

In 1921 Beatrix Potter received a visitor from the United States that set her on a journey of self-appreciation she didn’t know she needed until it came. Though she loved her life as a farmer in the Lake District she also had her other life as a literary star. When Anne Carol Moore, the Superintendent of Children’s Work for the New York Public Library asked to meet her:

“Beatrix was curious to meet an intelligent woman who knew something about the genre of children’s literature, as well as someone who was appreciative of her work. Although Beatrix was perfectly content in her marriage, she and William did not talk much about her books or her art. He knew little of the material in her old portfolios and even less of her current efforts. In this, as in other ways, Beatrix continued to compartmentalize her life—particularly her past life. But as a consequence she was hungry to talk to someone knowledgeable  about both writers and writing for children”(Lear 313).

Children’s Literature as an important category in the publishing and educational worlds was just beginning to take hold in America and had not started in Britain. “There were no equivalent  professional children’s librarians in Britain, and she knew no one with Moore’s expertise”(Lear 314).

Being a Unitarian gave Potter a special insider appeal to the literary world of Boston. After Moore’s visit, Potter received many more American visitors.

Then she met Bertha Mahony who requested biographical information for The Horn Book Magazine that she began with Elinor Whitney. This was a groundbreaking publication dedicated to children’s literature. Mahony also created the first children’s bookstore in Boston and The Horn Book, Inc., a publishing house. The Horn Book Magazine and Mahony’s ventures sought to promote the love of reading in children to enhance their lives and instill a lifelong love of learning.

One of the authors Mahony admired and wanted to know more about was the famous British children’s author Beatrix Potter. After the death of Norman Warne, Potter had not received much praise or camaraderie around her writing. This newfound respect arriving from America when Potter was in her sixties was well-deserved and a long time coming.

Read Nasty Women Writers post on Bertha Mahony: Bertha Mahony (1882-1969): A Pioneer for Children’s Literature.

Thus began a close friendship between Mahony and Potter and created an avenue for Potter to enter American mainstream, even leading to a publishing deal with an American press for the book, The Fairy Caravan.

The Fairy Caravan tells the story of a circus which travels around under the veil of invisibility offered through the use of the magical fern seed. The circus puts on their shows in secret for the invisible Little Folk because the Big Folk have become too threatening to their way of life. The caravan is made up of a series of misfit animals and the tales are stories of farm animals from Potter’s very own farms on locations in the Lake District. As well as the land and way of life, Potter was keenly aware that the stories, poetry, legends and folk beliefs of the people of the Lake District were also endangered. Thus, she worked toward preserving those as well.

The Fairy Caravan ends with a tale about The Fairy in the Oak who so loves her home tree that when it is cut down she lives at the bridge made of its wood, continuing to guard and protect it.

“Surely it is cruel to cut down a very fine tree! Each dull, dead thud of the axe hurts the little green fairy that lives in its heart. That fairy in the oak had been a harmless timid spirit for many hundred years. Long ago, when the oak was a sapling, there had been wolves; and the dalesmen hunted them with hounds. The hunt swept through the forest; the frightened fairy leaped into the oak branches. She found the tree a place of refuge; therefore she loved it and made it her home. Because it had a guardian fairy, that oak grew tall and strong. And each of the finest trees in the forest had a fairy of its own as well.

There were birch fairies, beech fairies, alder fairies, and fairies of the fir trees and pines; all were dressed in the leaves of their own special trees; and in the spring when the trees had new leaves, each fairy got herself a new green gown”(Potter 183).

The Fairy Caravan was published first in America in 1929.

Beatrix Potter is a Nasty Woman Writer, Activist, Artist and Woman of Stem.

© Theresa C. Dintino 2024

Works Cited

Lear, Linda. Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. St. Matin’s Griffin. N.Y. 2007

Potter, Beatrix. The Fairy Caravan. F. Warne and Co. 1929.

Beatrix Potter: The Tale of the Linnean Society.https://www.linnean.org/the-society/history-of-science/beatrix-potter-the-tale-of-the-linnean-society#:~:text=She%20studied%20different%20fungi%20and,tracking%20them%20under%20the%20microscope