Natural history has always been one of my great interests. As a teenager, my brother and I would collect anything we could get our hands on- plants, animals, and insects. If we found a dead animal, we would recreate its skeleton without its skin and organs. Everything we collected we would draw, paint and describe in notebooks.
In one notebook I wrote the following when I was eight, about a particular insect:
“The caterpillar of the tiger feeds on the nettle and hawthorn and is found in June, they are covered with black, white, and red. They are found by roadsides and lanes.”
After I no longer had a governess to teach me my lessons, I would spend long hours in the Natural History Museum in London. Entomology (that is the study of insects) continued to fascinate me. I loved to look at the tiniest beings under microscopes and then draw them the best that I could. By my late twenties I had learned so much about fungi that I presented a paper to the Linnean Society about my discoveries on the germination of a certain species.
But soon after I would begin to write my little stories and grow an interest in keeping land in its natural state.
What are your hobbies?
Source
Lane, Margaret. The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter. Frederick Warne Publishers: London, 1978, pp.23-29, 39-41.
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