UK Edition
How Beatrix Potter put the Lake District landscape on the map
Once upon a time there was a little boy. He liked gardening. He grew up still liking gardening and did it for a living. But the first book that he can remember reading is a story that began “Once upon a time there were four little rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter.”
My fondness for The Tales of Beatrix Potter – in particular The Tale of Peter Rabbit – has remained, and in adulthood I moved on to The Tale of Beatrix Potter by Margaret Lane, and an assortment of books by Leslie Linder detailing other aspects of her life, including her code-written journal. The reason for this fascination? There are several.
For a start there are the paintings, beautifully constructed vignettes, supremely accurate in their anatomy (Miss Potter would dissect small animals and study their internal structure with the same assiduity as did George Stubbs when creating his iconic Anatomy of the Horse).
Her paintings of fungi, undertaken when she was in early womanhood, were good enough to impress the then director of Kew Gardens, Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, even though at that time he was too misogynistic to employ her as a botanical illustrator. Miss Potter’s paintings of flowers and plants, be they foxgloves in Jemima Puddle-Duck or pelargoniums in clay flowerpots in Peter Rabbit, have always entranced me.
The stories themselves are miniature masterpieces, some of them frivolous, but most of them cautionary tales: Jemima Puddle-Duck was foolish in trusting a wily fox, Jeremy Fisher incautious when it came to fishing above a large trout, and Squirrel Nutkin paid the ultimate price for teasing the owl – he lost his tail. The ending of that story made me uneasy as a child. It still does.
But there were lighter tales. Few little girls would not be won over by Mrs Tiggy-Winkle or little boys unsympathetic towards a naughty and portly Tom Kitten.
As I grew older, the tale of the woman herself became even more compelling than those of her creations: a strict upbringing by parents who were not at all keen on her choosing a profession rather than a suitable husband. The romantic attachment to Norman Warne, the son of her publisher, who tragically died before they could be married. Her subsequent marriage to William Heelis, a Lake District solicitor, and her move from London to the shores of her beloved Windermere.
Mrs Heelis, as she then preferred to be called, was something of an enigma. A woman who gradually stopped writing stories and turned to breeding Herdwick sheep. A woman who spurned fame but devoted the proceeds of her bestselling children’s books to buying up chunks of the Lake District and handing them over to the fledgling National Trust so that they would be protected for future generations. The present appearance of “Cumbria” owes much to her in terms of its conservation measures. Her legacy is in landscape as much as in children’s literature.
As to horticulture, I remember admiring the rhubarb that still grows inside the wrought iron gate at Hill Top Farm, Sawrey, and which features in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck. The various paintings of gardens within the tales – cabbages in Mr McGregor’s garden and the walled garden itself which was apparently inspired by the one at Camfield Place in Hertfordshire and which eventually became the home of Dame Barbara Cartland.
The two women might seem to be miles apart, culturally as well as geographically, but both were indomitable in their own way and, although polar opposites in terms of taste, I suspect they would have had a sneaking admiration for each other’s tenacity.
In her new book, Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, Marta McDowell expands our knowledge of Miss Potter/Mrs Heelis’s horticultural expertise and background, explaining what she grew and where. There are photographs here that I have never seen before of Beatrix and her gardens, and delicious watercolours of rose hips and violets, clematis and honeysuckle, snapdragons and waterlilies – with and without rabbits, frogs and guileless ducks.
The book offers a peep at an aspect of Beatrix’s life that remained important to her until the end, and reminds us of our debt to the young London girl who became, in her latter years, a crusty Cumbrian (how she would have hated the loss of “Cumberland and Westmorland”). She was the Lake District’s greatest champion and the saviour of its divine landscape. She was also, as this books shows, a happy cottage gardener.
'Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life’ by Marta McDowell is £14.99 + £1.35 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514)
To order Beatrix Potter the Complete Tales for only £30 with free p&p, visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514