Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943)

Beatrix Potter was an English author, illustrator, natural scientist and conservationist best known for her imaginative children’s books featuring animals such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit which celebrated the British landscape and country life.

Born into a privileged Unitarian family, Potter, along with her younger brother, Walter Bertram (1872–1918), grew up with few friends outside her large, extended family. Her parents were artistic, interested in nature and enjoyed the countryside. As children, Beatrix and Bertram had numerous small animals as pets which they observed closely and drew endlessly. Summer holidays were spent in Scotland and in the English Lake District where Beatrix developed a love of the natural world which was the subject of her painting from an early age.

She was educated by private governesses until she was eighteen. Her study of languages, literature, science and history was broad and she was an eager student. Her artistic talents were recognized early. She enjoyed private art lessons, and developed her own style, favouring watercolour. Along with her drawings of her animals, real and imagined, she illustrated insects, fossils, archaeological artefacts, and fungi. In the 1890s her mycological illustrations and research on the reproduction of fungi spores generated interest from the scientific establishment. Following some success illustrating cards and booklets, Potter wrote and illustrated The Tale of Peter Rabbit publishing it first privately in 1901, and a year later as a small, three-colour illustrated book with Frederick Warne & Co. She became unofficially engaged to her editor Norman Warne in 1905 despite the disapproval of her parents, but he died suddenly a month later, of leukemia.

With the proceeds from the books and a legacy from an aunt, Potter bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, a tiny village in the English Lake District near Ambleside in 1905. Over the next several decades, she purchased additional farms to preserve the unique hill country landscape. In 1913, at the age of 47, she married William Heelis, a respected local solicitor from Hawkshead. Potter was also a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick sheep and a prosperous farmer keenly interested in land preservation. She continued to write, illustrate and design spin-off merchandise based on her children’s books for Warne until the duties of land management and diminishing eyesight made it difficult to continue. Potter published over twenty-three books; the best known are those written between 1902 and 1922. She died on 22 December 1943 at her home in Near Sawrey at age 77, leaving almost all her property to the National Trust. She is credited with preserving much of the land that now comprises the Lake District National Park.

Potter’s books continue to sell throughout the world, in multiple languages. Her stories have been retold in song, film, ballet and animation.

Beatrix Potter’s parents did not discourage higher education. As was common in the Victorian era, women of her class were privately educated and rarely sent to college.

 

 

Agaricaceae

An illustration by Potter

Beatrix Potter was interested in every branch of natural science save astronomy. Botany was a passion for most Victorians and nature study was a popular enthusiasm. Potter was eclectic in her tastes; collecting fossils, studying archeological artifacts from London excavations, and interested in entomology. In all of these areas she drew and painted her specimens with increasing skill. By the 1890s her scientific interests centred on mycology. First drawn to fungi because of their colours and evanescence in nature and her delight in painting them, her interest deepened after meeting Charles McIntosh, a revered naturalist and mycologist during a summer holiday in Dunkeld in Perthshire in 1892. He helped improve the accuracy of her illustrations, taught her taxonomy, and supplied her with live specimens to paint during the winter. Curious as to how fungi reproduced Potter began microscopic drawings of fungi spores (the agarics) and in 1895 developed a theory of their germination. Through the aegis of her scientific uncle, Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, a chemist and vice chancellor of the University of London, she consulted with botanists at Kew Gardens, convincing George Massee of her ability to germinate spores and her theory of hybridisation. She did not believe in the theory of symbiosis proposed by Simon Schwendener, the German mycologist as previously thought, rather she proposed a more independent process of reproduction.

Rebuffed by William Thiselton-Dyer, the Director at Kew, because of her gender and her amateur status, Beatrix wrote up her conclusions and submitted a paper On the Germination of the Spores of the Agariciceae to the Linnean Society in 1897. It was introduced by Massee because, as a female, Potter could not attend proceedings or read her paper. She subsequently withdrew it realising that some of her samples were contaminated, but continued her microscopic studies for several more years. Her paper has only recently been rediscovered, along with the rich, artistic illustrations and drawings that accompanied it. Her work is only now being properly evaluated. Potter later gave her other mycological drawings and scientific drawings to the Armitt Museum and Library in Ambleside where mycologists still refer to them to identify fungi. There is also a collection of her fungi paintings at the Perth Museum and Art Gallery in Perth, Scotland donated by Charles McIntosh. In 1967 the mycologist W.P.K. Findlay included many of Potter’s beautifully accurate fungi drawings in his Wayside & Woodland Fungi, thereby fulfilling her desire to one day have her fungi drawings published in a book. In 1997 the Linnean Society issued a posthumous apology to Potter for the sexism displayed in its handling of her research.

Potter gave her folios of mycological drawings to the Armitt Library and Museum in Ambleside before her death.

Anna (Children) Atkins (1799 – 1871)

Anna (Children) Atkins was an English botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. Some sources claim that she was the first woman to create a photograph.

She was born in Tonbridge, Kent, England in 1799. Her mother Hester Anne "didn't recover from the effects of childbirth," and died in 1800. Anna became close to her father John George Children, who was a scientist of many interests; for example, he was honoured by having the mineral childrenite and the Children's python, Antaresia childreni, named after him. Anna "received an unusually scientific education for a woman of her time." Her detailed engravings of shells were used to illustrate her father's translation of Lamarck's Genera of Shells, which was published in 1823.

She married John Pelly Atkins in 1825, and they moved to Halstead Place, the Atkins family home in Sevenoaks, Kent.  She then pursued her interests in botany, for example by collecting dried plants. These were probably used as photograms later.

Sir John Herschel, a friend of Atkins and Children, invented the cyanotype photographic process in 1842.

Within a year, Atkins applied the process to algae (specifically, seaweed) by making cyanotype photograms that were contact printed "by placing the unmounted dried-algae original directly on the cyanotype paper".

Atkins self-published her photograms in the first installment of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in October 1843. Although privately published, with a limited number of copies, and with handwritten text, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions is considered the first book illustrated with photographic images. Eight months later, in June 1844, the first fascicle of William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature was released; that book was the "first photographically illustrated book to be commercially published" or "the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs".

Atkins produced a total of three volumes of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions between 1843 and 1853. Only 17 copies of the book are known to exist, in various states of completeness. Because of the book's rarity and historical importance, it is quite expensive. One copy of the book with 411 plates in three volumes sold for GBP 133,500 at auction in 1996. Another copy with 382 prints in two volumes which was owned by scientist Robert Hunt (1807-1887) sold for GBP 229,250 at auction in 2004.

In the 1850s, Atkins collaborated with Anne Dixon (1799–1864), who was "like a sister" to her, to produce at least three presentation albums of cyanotype photograms:

    Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853), now in the J. Paul Getty Museum.

    Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns (1854), disassembled pages of which are held by various museums and collectors.

    An album inscribed to "Captain Henry Dixon," Anne Dixon's nephew (1861).

In addition, she published books with non-photographic work:

    Atkins, Anna. The perils of fashion. London, 1852.

    Atkins, Anna. The Colonel. A story of fashionable life. By the author of "The perils of fashion." London: Hurst & Blackett, 1853.

    Atkins, Anna. Memoir of J.C. Children, including some unpublished poetry by his father and himself. London: John Bowye Nichols and Sons, 1853.

    Atkins, Anna. Murder will out. A story of real life. By the author of "The colonel," etc. London, 1859.

    Atkins, Anna. A page from the peerage. By the author of "The colonel." London, 1863.

She died at Halstead Place in 1871 of "paralysis, rheumatism, and exhaustion" at the age of 72.

Frances Meehan Latterell (1920 – 2008)

Frances Meehan Latterell was an American plant pathologist whose research in the late 1940s opened a major new area of inquiry into the physiological basis of plant disease. She was the senior author on a classic 1947 paper showing that the toxin victorin, produced by the pathogenic fungus Helminthosporium victoriae, caused symptoms of Victoria blight of oats, a new disease first described by Latterell and her major professor in 1946. This discovery of a host-specific toxin, as victorin was later named, gave scores of subsequent researchers new model systems for studying plant disease.

Victoria blight on oats

Latterell, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, an accomplished child pianist, received her BA degree from the University of Kansas City and MS and PhD degrees from Iowa State University. During her career as research plant pathologist, US army biological laboratories, Fort Detrick, Maryland and plant pathologist, US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Frederick, Maryland, she conducted extensive research on cereal diseases, including gray leaf spot of corn and rice blast. In recognition of her long and active membership in the Potomac Division of the American Phytopathological Society, Latterell was given the Division’s Distinguished Service Award in 1987.

Gray leaf spot on corn

Rice blast

Since retirement in 1996 she and her husband, Dr. Richard Latterell, an environmentalist and biology professor emeritus at Shepherd University, have been active in animal welfare and environmental causes including water pollution and lead arsenate pollution in housing developments built on former apple orchards in Jefferson County, West Virginia, where they have lived for many years in an 18th-century farmhouse nearby Moler's Crossroads. They have also been active participants in local zoning and political campaigns. From 2005 to 2007 R. Latterell and other citizens have been the targets of a SLAPP suit for two million dollars in damages, seeking to punish them for their citizen activism. R. Latterell and the two other defendants were granted summary judgment in April, 2007 by the Circuit Court of Berkeley County, West Virginia in a decision upholding the defendants' First Amendment right to utilize administrative proceedings. Vegetarian, atheist, and childless, in 2005 the Latterells put their farm under a perpetual conservation easement under the auspices of the West Virginia Farmland Protection Act, a statute whose passage the Latterells actively supported.

Francis Mehan Latterell died in 2008.

The idea that toxins caused plant diseases goes back to papers in 1886 and 1913, but Latterell's 1947 paper and a 1955 paper by H. H. Luke gave the first proofs. Latterell showed that fungus creates a toxin which causes the same symptoms as Victoria blight on the same oat cultivars which suffer from Victoria blight, but causes no symptoms on cultivars which resist the blight. Luke went on to show that different strains of the fungus create different levels of toxin, which correlate with the effects seen in oats.

In 1973 Latterell and Luke shared the prestigious Ruth Allen Award in plant pathology. Its citation said, "The work of these two investigators provided the impetus for, and guided the direction of, much of the research on the role of toxins in plant diseases during the past two decades, victorin alone has been the subject of more than 100 research reports from several different laboratories. Their work also served as the model for research on many other diseases in which toxins play a role. Laboratory exercises based on the methods developed with victorin are a routine part of plant pathology courses in a large number of institutions. The demonstration that toxins may provide valid substitutes for pathogens led to practical applications in mass screening for disease resistance and in toxin tests for identification of mixtures in seed lots." (Phytopathology, v. 63, December 1973, p. 9)

On August 17, 2010 Frances Latterell was posthumously recognized at the 5th International Rice Blast Conference with a Lifetime Dedication to Rice Blast Research Award.

The Ruth Allen Award has been given since 1966 by the American Phytopathological Society. It honors individuals who have made an outstanding, innovative research contribution that has changed, or has the potential to change, the direction of research in any field of plant pathology. (It has no relation to the pipeline industry's Ruth Allen award established in 2005.)

The fungus' asexual stage was called Helminthosporium victoriae when Latterell and Luke published their work. Since then it has been renamed Bipolaris victoriae. Its sexual stage (teleomorph) is called Cochliobolus victoriae.

Latterell's classic paper was "Differential Phytotoxicity of Metabolic By-Products of Helminthosporium victoriae" published in Science, v. 104, pp. 413–414, September 19, 1947.

Nancy M. Adams CBE QSO (1926-2007)

Nancy Adams was one of New Zealand's foremost botanists and botanical artists. Her watercolours and drawings are widely known through reproduction in nearly forty publications on native trees and shrubs, alpine plants, wild flowers and seaweeds that she has written and illustrated. Her books have helped many New Zealanders to learn more about the native flora of their country. 

Nancy Adams joined the Dominion Museum (now Te Papa) in 1959, eventually specialising in marine algae and developing the museum's seaweed collection. She retired in 1987 from the position Assistant Curator of Botany and became an honorary Research Associate of the museum. World-renowned for her work on seaweeds, in 1994 she produced the highly regarded Seaweeds of New Zealand: an illustrated guide which was the 1995 Montana book of the year. 

In 2006 a substantial collection of watercolours, drawings, sketchbooks and ephemera by Nancy Adams was purchased for the Te Papa Archive. Works include illustrations for Adams' numerous publications such as Seaweeds of New Zealand: an illustrated guide, Common seaweeds of New Zealand, Trees and shrubs of New Zealand, New Zealand native trees volumes 1 and 2, and New Zealand alpine plants.