Mushrooms by Post

In December 1892, Beatrix Potter told Charles McIntosh about something she had forgotten in a tin canister. It was a piece of broom carrying a fungus she knew as Agaricus velutipes. Left in the dark, it had produced a crowd of pale growths, nearly a hundred of what she called fingers. She had moved it into a warm cupboard near the kitchen chimney. Its appearance changed again.

Potter wondered whether she had something new. The mycologist Roy Watling later interpreted the growth as an elongated, light-deprived form of the same fungus, now called Flammulina velutipes. Her letter records the problem before that answer: a familiar organism had become difficult to recognise, and heat, darkness and season were possible explanations.

She included a sketch. Elsewhere in the same letter, she asked McIntosh to mark the rarest specimens in his parcels so that she could paint them first. One had already gone mouldy in foggy weather. A specimen could arrive with an interesting question attached and lose its useful features before she had finished another drawing.

A parcel in return for a painting

Potter was twenty-six, living with her parents in London and already an experienced observer of animals and plants. She would later become famous for her illustrated children’s books about Peter Rabbit. Long family holidays gave her access to other collecting grounds. Around Birnam and Dunkeld in Perthshire, Scotland, she encountered a naturalist who knew both the country and the fungi appearing in it.

Charles McIntosh had been the family’s postman during her childhood. By the time their sustained exchange began in 1892, he was a retired postman with a considerable reputation among naturalists. His specimens and knowledge circulated beyond the district. Potter’s father had earlier given him reference books on British fungi, acknowledging the seriousness of his work.

Potter and McIntosh arranged an exchange: he would send fungi, and she would send paintings. Both contributed something the other could use. He could find, identify and describe specimens she might never encounter during a short holiday. She could preserve their appearance in colour after the originals had withered or decayed.

A handsome cap was only part of a useful fungal portrait. McIntosh encouraged her to include a section showing how the gills met the stalk, and whether the stalk was hollow. Cutting a mushroom opened up features that its intact silhouette concealed. Identification depended on looking underneath and inside as well as recording colour.

Potter often drew a fungus twice. The extra work gave her something to send while retaining a record herself. Her December letter asked whether the drawings were accurate enough to be worth McIntosh accepting them. The question was practical: these were to circulate among people who might use them to recognise another specimen.

The red waxcap sheet above combines an intact group with isolated examples and a cut section. Its small studies occupy much less space than the coloured mushrooms, but belong to the same task of recording more than an outward likeness. This is a different species from the fungus in her tin canister.

Getting beyond the mushroom

The mushroom visible above ground is a fruiting body. Much of the fungus grows as fine branching threads; their network is called a mycelium. A mushroom releases spores, which can germinate and begin growing new threads. Following that change requires a different sort of attention from painting a collected cap.

By 1896, Potter was growing spores on glass and watching them through a microscope. She wanted to follow what emerged, rather than simply establish a name for the mushroom that had supplied them. Different appearances raised questions about stages in a fungus’s life. They also raised an awkward alternative: something else might have entered the culture.

Her uncle, the chemist Sir Henry Roscoe, helped her gain access to scientific contacts. At the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in west London, she dealt with the mycologist George Massee. Their relationship included both disagreement and assistance. Massee could identify specimens, advised her work and eventually communicated her paper. Potter did not quietly accept his judgement on everything she saw.

In a letter to Kew’s director, William Thiselton-Dyer, in December 1896, she asked him to examine drawings and a proposed paper which, she said, contradicted Massee. She also reported his objections to her slides. The disagreement concerned observations that other people needed to inspect and reproduce. Good drawings could show what she had seen, but a living culture offered a further test.

By February 1897, Potter told McIntosh that she had germinated between forty and fifty sorts of spores. For the paper she intended to concentrate on Agaricus velutipes. She reported growing it on twice, and said that Massee had also grown it at Kew following her directions. A man who had disputed her slides was now, in her account, repeating the work.

That still left the problem of presenting it. She wanted a good slide with spores actually sprouting before sending the paper to the Linnean Society of London, a learned society concerned with natural history. The work depended on organisms being ready at the right time. She asked McIntosh to pause his deliveries: her slides were full of mushrooms which refused to grow when required.

The surviving correspondence does not settle every question about what grew in those cultures. Potter was considering links between mushrooms and forms then classified as moulds, and wondering about possible hybrids. Those were hypotheses under investigation. A changing shape, or several forms appearing together, could prompt an experiment without proving her explanation for it.

Her experiments on lichens led her to a different conclusion from the one later admirers have sometimes credited to her. In January 1897 she explicitly told McIntosh that she did not believe Schwendener’s theory. That theory identified lichens as an association of fungus and alga. Potter was investigating the organisms while rejecting that explanation of them.

A paper read, a manuscript withdrawn

On 1 April 1897, On the germination of the spores of Agaricineae, submitted under the name Helen B. Potter, was read and discussed at the Linnean Society. Massee read it. On 8 April Potter withdrew it. She never resubmitted it for publication.

The distinction matters because a more decisive story has often taken its place: a woman’s paper supposedly rejected outright by men who would not hear her. Women really were excluded from the Society’s Fellowship until 1905. Potter worked within an unequal scientific world. But having someone else read a paper was the Society’s ordinary procedure for authors, and its records do not show an outright rejection of hers.

More work was required before publication. The precise changes requested are unknown, and the Society does not hold the withdrawn manuscript. Its missing text cannot tell us exactly how she arranged her evidence, what claims she retained or how far her conclusions went beyond the letters.

Nor did April bring her experiments to an immediate end. In September, writing again to McIntosh, Potter reported that her paper had been well received according to Massee, but needed more work before printing. She was still discussing cultures. Getting a spore to sprout and getting its growing network to continue were different difficulties; some fungi responded more readily than others. Her questions about mould forms and possible hybrids, she recognised, could take years.

Drawing, and looking again

The drawings survived more successfully than the paper. Collections at the Armitt Museum and Library, the V&A and elsewhere preserve her fungi and microscopic studies. Their value includes details she could record without fully understanding them. A precise observation can remain useful after its maker’s explanation has changed.

Illustration still involves choosing which features to follow and how to render them. In the V&A’s short film, the contemporary illustrator Katie Scott draws a fly agaric inspired by Potter’s botanical work. Her process combines drawing with digital work and scanned watercolour textures. It is a present-day response, rather than a reconstruction of Potter’s method, and the fungus is another species again.

A closer look · 2:49 · English

Drawing a mushroom with Katie Scott

Play film

Potter’s side of the postal exchange resurfaced in an especially useful form in 1975. Preparing a talk about McIntosh, the mycologist Mary Noble received a parcel from his niece. It contained letters which had been returned to the family after work on a book about him roughly half a century earlier.

The correspondence helped Noble identify a group of twenty-four unsigned Potter watercolours in Perth. Letters about parcels, specimens and drawings could be put beside the pictures once more. Her request was there too: mark the rarest specimen in each parcel, so that she could paint it first.