Beatrix Potter

Potter Earl Plato
The beginning of another day, another week, another year- it’s another Monday in 2006. What will it bring? One thing I know that this Monday I am heading again to Abino Hills. Tracks - animal tracks are my quest this day. I left my Peterson Track guide at home but I have in my pocket the small Dorcas Miller booklet - Track Finder. Again as in past years I want to become better at identifying track prints. With permission I enter through the security gates at Point Abino and head west down Brown’s Road. I am now rambling on the Bert Miller Nature Trail and headed for the lake trail. I have my record sketch book. A quick drawing may help me later. I stop and turn around. Why? The snow is too deep for good tracking. I’ll report later, eh.
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If I asked you who was Beatrix Potter? Many of you would recognize the name of a woman famous for her series of children’s books. You remember the Peter Rabbit series. Martin Silverstone wrote about Beatrix recently and says “she was foremost a dedicated mycologist.” A what?
Thanks to the Internet I visited her extensive collection of scientific research on FUNGI. I was able to download her numerous drawings found at the Armitt Library Museum display in the U.K. I like to photograph and draw specimens found locally. Marcy Woods was one of my favorite places to find unusual fungi such as the horse shoe species. Beatrix Potter roamed the hills and dales of northwestern England, the Lake District. Her detailed drawings and the labelings of her fungi finds are amazing.
Despite all her fame as an authoress, the general public knew nothing of her first true love - a fascination with mushrooms. Remember she lived in Victorian times. Young ladies did not assume to be scientists. A scientists she was - a mycologist. When they decoded Potter’s secret diary her amazing skills were exposed. The drawings and research on fungi-were finally published in 1966 that was 23 years after her death at the age of 77. My connection to Beatrix? I like to sketch fungi We learn that the bundles, and there were bundles, contained pages of drawings and texts. They revealed the dramatic story of her attempts to present her theories on symbiosis and the germination of fungi spores.
Next time you come upon a mushroom or a toadstool think about a young English lady, Beatrix Potter. Want a new hobby?