by Linda Lear
The public dialogue was carried on in a flood of magazines and journals intended for a wide readership. The Potters subscribed to Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, a short-lived, but highly respected journal known affectionately as Science-Gossip, published monthly as an illustrated medium for ‘the exchange of information for students and lovers of nature’. It featured short essays and articles on various general subjects such as wasps, the hummingbird hawkmoth, geology, entomology and microscopy, as well as short notes and a section for public enquiries and expert responses. The mycologist M. C. Cooke was one of the editors of Science-Gossip during the time that Beatrix had access to it. His accurate pen-and-ink drawings, notable for their hints of texture and habitat, illustrated many of the articles on fungi. The demise of Science-Gossip in 1893 mirrored the decline of the science generalist and the amateur naturalist.7
Beatrix’s interest in drawing and painting mushrooms, or fungi, began as a passion for painting beautiful specimens wherever she found them. She never saw art and science as mutually exclusive activities, but recorded what she saw in nature primarily to evoke an aesthetic response. She was drawn to fungi first by their ephemeral fairy qualities and then by the variety of their shape and colour and the challenge they posed to watercolour techniques. 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.8
Her first known fungi watercolours were done in the summer of 1887 at Lingholm. Two survive from this date. There were more the following year: a common white helvella (Helvella crispa) which she drew in its grassy habitat, a wood hedgehog (Hydnum repandum) and a common chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius). In December, she painted a wood blewit (Lepista nuda) and a russet shank (Collybia dryophila) at Camfield. In both, she included their leafy substrate to illustrate context. Beatrix provided no Latin names for these early drawings, suggesting that she did not know them, and had selected them for their visual appeal.9
In 1886 Rupert purchased an expensive two-volume set of the Revd John Stevenson’s new opus on British fungi, Hymenomycetes Britannici (British Fungi) from his London bookseller. It was an odd and expensive reference work for Rupert to buy for himself and some months later he generously offered it to the learned but impecunious McIntosh, whose need of reference books was well known around Birnam.10
The Potters chose the picturesque village of Birnam for their summer holiday in 1892 after successive years at Derwentwater and Windermere undoubtedly because it offered good fishing and fine landscapes. Birnam was very near Dalguise, but Heath Park, the house the Potters rented just outside the village, was so different that Beatrix expressed no sadness at returning to the area. In spite of its grand name Heath Park was a modest villa distinguished by a pair of six-sided spire-like turrets. It was situated on just one acre, facing out over the steep hillside, along with three other similarly styled houses, at what Beatrix thought might be optimistically described as ‘a convenient remove’ from the railway station. In fact, the house was immediately above the Birnam station.11
Rupert was delighted with the constant activity below, and with the coming and going of the trains which he supervised at night from his bedroom window. It took some doing to cram the servants into their quarters, and the horses, phaeton and pony cart into the stable. The house was also difficult to reach. ‘We have unluckily a very steep narrow lane to get down first, under the railway, and hanging over the Inchewan Burn.’ To make matters worse, the Burn was the playing ground for the local children, one of whom ‘invented a charming game of “bolting the pony” under the railway arch’. Notwithstanding such assaults and inconvenience, the Potters settled into a predictable routine. Rupert went out fishing or photographing and after arranging the house as best she could, Helen occupied herself shopping in Dunkeld and making calls on old friends. Beatrix made daily excursions with her pony, traversing the Tay Valley where she took photographs with her father’s old camera and sketched.12
Heath Park offered a redeeming view of the Birnam green and the distant meandering Tay. A short climb further up the Birnam hill behind the house allowed splendid views of nearby Dunkeld. The house and the garden were in considerable disrepair, but Beatrix discovered a good supply of gooseberries for her rabbit, Benjamin, when he became sufficiently brave to explore his new surroundings. As a precaution she took him out in the garden on a leather dog-lead, which provoked amused comments from the staff.13
Beatrix’s detailed account of her holiday in Birnam reveals just how extensively she explored this area of the Tay Valley with her pony and trap, or the phaeton. Her very first trip was to Inver to visit Kitty MacDonald, their old washerwoman at Dalguise, who was by now 83. Beatrix described her still ‘waken, and delightfully merry… She is a comical, round little old woman, as brown as a berry and wears a multitude of petticoats and a white mutch. Her memory goes back for seventy years and I really believe she is prepared to enumerate the articles of her first wash in the year ’71.’14
The 26-year-old woman who emerges from these journal pages is not only alive to the natural environment about her, but eager and interested in the lives of the ordinary people of Perthshire. She observes people with the same acuity as she observes non-human nature, treating them with almost sociological detachment, keenly aware of language and accent, always on the look-out for the telling physical detail. She gathered her samples in spare verbal portraits, but most are leavened with kindness and humour. Physically active, delighting in her freedom outdoors and intellectually engaged, Beatrix was only occasionally oppressed by her mother’s demands or annoying familial duties.
Her travels took her to both sides of the Tay Valley, through luxuriant forests, and into dry, rocky hill country. The hard-working Scottish hill farmers intrigued her, and she filed away in her memory what she observed as she travelled about, noting particularly the changes in the physical environment. She had an unparalleled opportunity to observe the agrarian economy: the quality of the land, how the farmers enriched the soil and irrigated their farms, what crops they counted on as staples for the long winter months, the livestock they raised and the wildlife they hunted. Beatrix commented especially on the condition of the livestock, the customs of breeding, and the odd practice of de-horning cattle. She enjoyed finding the elusive roc deer and was fascinated by the peculiar habits of the red squirrel. She observed the damage to trees done by gnawing rabbits, writing: ‘I confess reluctantly, strengthened by observation of the revered Benjamin, [that rabbits] are not game at all, but absolute vermin as regards eating.’15
In addition to perfecting her photography, Beatrix continued to produce illustrations for greetings cards or booklets. Shortly after arriving in Birnam, she discovered a tame jackdaw belonging to the tenants who lived on the road behind Heath Park. She made a pen-and-ink drawing of it, turning the curious little black bird into a beady-eyed chimney sweep carrying a set of long-handled brushes. She sent the drawing to Ernest Nister, the German firm of fine art printers in London, who had previously purchased some of her drawings on commission, but had not yet paid her. She produced a fine landscape of a group of beeches, titled A Beechwood near Inver, Dunkeld, as well as at least four fungi paintings.16
Beatrix had been trying to speak with Charlie McIntosh, ‘that learned but extremely shy man’, all summer. Her efforts to engage him had been frustrated by his shyness and by Victorian prohibitions against calling on him when she was visiting Inver. Beatrix had known McIntosh since she had been a child of four. She remembered how it had been ‘an amusement to hop from puddle to puddle on the strides of Charlie’s hob-nailed boots. I forget how many thousand miles he walked, some mathematical person reckoned it up.’ In fact, it was about 200,000 miles. The next postman had a tricycle, but Beatrix had grasped McIntosh’s uniqueness, writing: ‘modern habits and machines are not calculated to bring out individuality or the study of Natural History.’17
McInto
sh was raised in a musical family, learned the fiddle and the art of wood carving, and was drawn to natural science as a boy. After minimum but good schooling, he went to work in the Inver sawmill where, in 1857, he suffered the loss of all the fingers on his left hand in an accident. With such a disability his job choices were limited and by default he became a rural postman, though with persistence and talent he continued to play the cello, directed the choir at the Little Dunkeld parish church, and was superintendent of the town band. But he was always self-conscious about his maimed hand and kept it hidden as much as possible.18
His natural history was self-taught, but his mother encouraged his interest in ferns, urging him to give his beautifully displayed fern collection to the Birnam Institute, which brought his abilities to professional notice. His long walks delivering the mail gave him ample opportunity to observe the flora and fauna, to note geological formations of the Tay Valley and the marks of flood and drought. It was seldom that McIntosh returned from his daily postal rounds without what he called a ‘poochfu’ o’ weeds’, and it was in studying and identifying these that he made significant discoveries.19
McIntosh had done some research for the founder of the Perthshire Society of Natural Science and in payment for his contributions he was given special borrowing privileges at the Society’s library. Access to the latest reference books, the Stevenson volumes and J. M. Berkeley’s Outlines of British Fungology, enlivened his interest in fungi. Despite the loss of his fingers McIntosh was able to make sections and slides and to draw under the microscope. Soon his humble cottage at Inver was the destination of notable botanists and mycologists who were undoubtedly surprised by McIntosh’s easy collegiality. When the ‘Perthshire naturalist’ found someone who shared his interests, he was a devoted and selfless mentor.20
One day near the end of October, Beatrix and her father stopped by A. F. Mackenzie’s photography studio. After they left, Mackenzie, ever the intermediary, sent up a book of dried ferns collected by McIntosh for Beatrix to look at, and ‘ingeniously’ arranged for McIntosh to call at Heath Park to retrieve his book, thereby giving Beatrix an opportunity to show him her fungi drawings. Beatrix recalled her earlier impressions of the postman naturalist:
When one met him, a more scared startled scarecrow it would be difficult to imagine. Very tall and thin, stooping with a weak chest, one arm swinging and the walking-stick much too short, hanging to the stump [of his hand] with a loop, a long wisp of whisker blowing over either shoulder, a drip from his hat and his nose, watery eyes fixed on the puddles or anywhere, rather than the other traveller’s face.21
McIntosh appeared at Heath Park at the appointed hour ‘with his soft hat, a walking stick, a little bundle, and very dirty boots… He was quite painfully shy and uncouth at first, as though he was trying to swallow a muffin, and rolling his eyes about and mumbling.’ She recounted in her journal, ‘I would not make fun of him for worlds, but he reminded me so much of a damaged lamp post. He warmed up to his favourite subject, his comments terse and to the point, and conscientiously accurate.’22
Among the drawings that Beatrix showed McIntosh that October afternoon were the two she had drawn at Lingholm. ‘I happened by lucky intuition’, Beatrix explained, ‘to have drawn several rare species.’ One of them McIntosh had also discovered for the first time that summer in a wood at Murthly, and ‘another, like a spluttered candle’, was similar ‘to one he had found just once in the grass at the road-side near Inver tunnel’. ‘He was certainly pleased with my drawings,’ she reported happily, ‘and his judgement speaking to their accuracy in minute botanical points gave me infinitely more pleasure than that of critics who assume more, and know less than poor Charlie.’ Deeply impressed with his knowledge, and grateful for his evaluation, Beatrix concluded, ‘He is a perfect dragon of erudition, and not gardener’s Latin either.’23
During their hour-and-a-half visit, Beatrix and McIntosh discussed a variety of points about fungi: how they grew, their habitat, classification and proper nomenclature. McIntosh ‘became quite excited and spoke with poetical feeling about their exquisite colours’. They also discussed techniques for drawing under the microscope, agreeing to an exchange of talent: he to send her fresh specimens in the post and she to return a drawing of them. After he had shown her his remarkable one-handed drawings, Beatrix gave him her sketchbook with fungi drawings that he had so admired.24
A box of specimens arrived from Birnam quite soon after she returned to London. She sent her first fungi drawings to McIntosh in early December, telling him, ‘it is a real pleasure to copy them, they are such lovely colours’, but she had become more curious about their taxonomy and wanted to learn proper botanical techniques of illustration. Sensing a willing student, McIntosh supplied each specimen with its scientific name and Beatrix worked at becoming more proficient at nomenclature and classification.25
In December Beatrix described an unidentified fungus that had sprouted on the same piece of broom where an Agaricus velutipes had previously grown. ‘Miss Potter wonders,’ she wrote with unusual formality, ‘whether it grows out of doors at this season or whether it is brought out by the heat of the room?’ She included a microscopic sketch of the finger-like primordia of the new fungus, showing where it had appeared on the broom, its scale and its characteristics. McIntosh had also sent some mosses. They were harder to draw because they had to be done under magnification. She would not return drawings of those, though she made some excellent ones for herself. But she took exception to the ‘horrid plant like a white stick with a loose cap which smells exactly like a dead sheep!’, and also suggested that McIntosh mark the rarest plant in each box so that she could draw it before it got damaged or too mouldy.26
In London, Beatrix’s study of fungi was limited to what was available at the Natural History Museum. She spent a great deal of time there looking at the portfolios of drawings and printed plates in an effort to learn the taxonomy, but it was not easy. The most important reference book available was James Sowerby’s monumental work, Coloured figures of English fungi or mushrooms (1793–1803), a work of over four hundred hand-coloured plates. Otherwise she had only the museum’s limited collection of fungi preserved in alcohol, or a sort of pickling brine in small glass bottles, and a few dried specimens. She found these so badly labelled as to be all but useless.
Beatrix was already frustrated that there was no one at the museum ‘to give any information’. They did not have the reference books she wanted, and they ‘take no interest whatever in funguses at large’. ‘Some day,’ she promised McIntosh, she would ‘ask at Kew Gardens whether there is anyone who knows more about the names’. In the meantime she made do with what was accessible and by the time the Potters returned to Dunkeld the following summer, she had become familiar with the basic literature on fungi classification and was prepared to take issue with the Kensington museum staff over the identification of some of their Boletus and Hygrophorus specimens.27
The Potters were elegantly situated for the summer of 1893 on the bank of the Tay in Dunkeld at Eastwood, a large dower house owned by the Duke of Atholl but subleased to them by a minor laird named Atholl McGregor. The large house was set in the woods with gardens at the back that rolled gently down to the river’s edge, and looked across to the Great Oak of Birnam. In contrast to the detailed journal Beatrix had kept the previous summer, there are almost no entries for this one. Beatrix and McIntosh evidently continued their collaboration, perhaps going to look for fungi together, for some of his favourite places are noted on her drawings. She shared her drawings, discussed her identifications, and benefited from his guidance. In all, Beatrix painted sixty fungi specimens that year, many of which are marked ‘Eastwood, 1893’.28
Three of those paintings are of the rare pine cone fungus, Strobilomyces strobilaceus, ‘old man of the woods’. Sometime in July, Beatrix discovered what she knew to be a rare fungus in the grounds of Eastwood. McIntosh tentatively identified it as Strobilomyces strobilaceus. But since
he had never seen it in the field before, he sent the specimen off for further verification. It was indeed very rare. It had first been recorded in Scotland at Drummond Wood in Crieff in 1889. Beatrix painted the now somewhat shrivelled specimen on 11 August. Less than a month later, after some hot rainy weather, Beatrix found the rare ‘old man of the woods’ again at Eastwood and, knowing what it was, made two paintings of it, at least one of which she painted in situ on 3 September. On the back of one drawing, which she gave to McIntosh, Beatrix made a little sketch of the garden at Eastwood and put an ‘x’ where she found the fungus, presumably so he would know where to look for it again.29
However exciting it was to find such a rare fungus, Beatrix was not totally absorbed by scientific illustration. She had heard from Annie Moore that same week that Noel was sick in bed and she wanted to send him a letter. Not certain what to write about, she made up a story about her new rabbit, Peter Piper, ‘bought at a very tender age, in the Uxbridge Road, Shepherds Bush, for the exorbitant sum of 4/6’, whom she had brought to Eastwood. Beatrix took Peter everywhere with her, just as she had Benjamin, drew him from every angle, taught him to do tricks, and was totally devoted to him. Noel knew Peter well and a letter about Peter’s adventures was tailor-made to cheer him.30
And so it was that on 4 September, the very day after discovering and drawing the rare pine cone fungus, Beatrix sat down in the sunshine on the lawn at Eastwood and wrote a picture letter about a disobedient young rabbit called ‘Peter’. ‘I don’t know what to write to you,’ Beatrix told him, ‘so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were – Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.’ The hero of her picture letter was her own rabbit Peter, but the villain of the story was ‘Mr McGregor’, the owner of the garden, whom Peter first encounters ‘round the end of a cucumber frame’ where McGregor, on hands and knees, was ‘planting out young cabbages’. Although McGregor is clearly doing physical labour, he is wearing a tabard, a sleeveless waistcoat buttoned up the front, and on his head is a deerstalker cap, with peaks at front and rear and earflaps tied with a ribbon and bow at the top of the head. The tabard and deerstalker are apparel that a minor laird would wear to show his status. Mr McGregor has a thin face, a long white beard, and wears rimless glasses. Just the day before, Beatrix had undoubtedly seen Charlie McIntosh on his hands and knees, with a single peaked cap on his head, looking at a rare fungus in the grass, through rimless spectacles, his long white wispy beard flowing about. The physical features of the fictional Mr McGregor are too similar not to have been drawn with McIntosh in mind, while his name and dress conformed, with poetic licence, to that of the Potters’ landlord, Atholl McGregor, who would have been about the property, given that the Potters were due to leave Eastwood the following Thursday.31
