No Foolin’
For several years I have been tempted to do an April Fools’ Day column. I remember so well the one that The Oregonian’s Dulcy Maher wrote about Pacific Northwest slugs being exported to France to be used as escargot. I was appalled and she had me until the very last line of her column when she wrote “April Fool!” But I am afraid I am not as clever as Dulcy was and I haven’t been able to come up with anything as fun as that. So instead, in honor of Easter and the Easter Bunny, I will pay homage this week to classical children’s writer Beatrix Potter.
You may be wondering why a story about Beatrix Potter belongs in a gardening column. I will explain in a moment, once I have given a little background. I am almost ashamed to say I did not grow up appreciating Beatrix Potter and her stories of Peter Rabbit, Farmer McGregor, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and all the other characters she so charmingly drew and created. Instead, I remember the stories of Peter Cottontail by Thornton W. Burgess and published by Wonder Book, and of course the song made famous by Gene Autry called “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.” Little did I realize Peter Cottontail was a 20th century “knockoff” of Ms. Potter’s Peter Rabbit. It wasn’t until many years later when I was visiting the Lake District in England that I realized the Windermere area was not only the home of poet William Wordsworth, but of Beatrix Potter as well.
Flash ahead to a few years ago when a dear friend loaned me a copy of the book Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life by Marta McDowell. My friend mentioned it had become one of her favorite top ten gardening books. And it didn’t take me long to figure out why. Not only was Beatrix Potter an extraordinary water colorist and illustrator, she was an excellent gardener. In fact, it was her love of gardening that first brought us Mr. McGregor and his trials and tribulations with Peter and his family.
Ms. Potter was born in London in 1866 to a family that had made their fortune in cotton. While she was not encouraged to meet and play with other children, she and her brother Bertram were given an excellent and varied education that included animals in the nursery and classes in art with tutors.
Never formally trained in art, from the time she was a child Beatrix enjoyed drawing scenes of nature. She was especially taken with the wide varieties of fungus, mosses and lichens and kept scientific illustrations of them in sketchbooks.
As an adult, Beatrix grew to become a great storyteller, too, and would send letters to her nieces and nephews about small animals in her parents’ gardens. Most of the time her letters contained illustrations of these animals and it wasn’t long before they were dressed in clothes and having childlike adventures. In 1905, after her letters had become published books, Ms. Potter used some of her royalties to purchase a small farm in the Lake District, calling it Hill Top Farm. She had observed her family’s gardener at their summer home in the Lake District for many years and knew what she liked and wanted to include in her own English garden. She observed other public and private gardens and designed her own spaces. She loved getting her hands dirty and was not one to stand back and supervise her hired man. But instead, she often pitched in and worked with her staff side by side. She would accept plants from neighbors and friends, a tradition that carries on in today’s world. As her royalties increased from subsequent books, Beatrix increased her farmland holdings, buying several more properties over her lifetime.
While Beatrix lived with her parents in London until she was married to William Heelis at the age of 47 in 1913, she took many, many trips to Hill Top Farm to enjoy the quiet and solitude there. Even when married, Beatrix and her husband lived at Castle Cottage, only a few miles from her beloved Hill Top Farm. And it was in her Hill Top gardens that many of the adventures of Peter Rabbit and his friends took place. She would use the garden gates, the garden shed, the garden walls as the physical background to the stories. Many of her illustrations for the books are also illustrations of the garden.
Beatrix Potter died in 1943, when, after being weakened by a bout of influenza, her heart gave out. She was 77 years old. Her ashes were spread over Hill Top Farm, and 4000 acres of her property would be left to the National Trust of the United Kingdom after the death of her husband Willie, only 18 months after her own.
Visitors still can make the somewhat complicated pilgrimage to Hill Top Farm where her garden remains a link to this remarkable woman.
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