We celebrate Beatrix Potter's Birthday this week and remember the delight we all felt when we read, or heard her stories. The fluffy characters, the mean gardener, and the tales of these rabbits and other creatures captured our imaginations as children.

We all know Beatrix Potter, the English writer and illustrator, however she was also a natural scientist, and conservationist. Her twenty three tales featuring animals, include such characters as Jeremy Fisher, Mr. Todd, Miss Moppet, Flopsy Bunnies and the Bad Mice. It is The Tale of Peter Rabbit, first published in 1902, that began her author journey.

Her fierce independence in an era of even stricter patriarchal societal dogma, is to be celebrated even more. She helped save, and preserve large areas of the English Lake District, by buying land and farms in order to protect them from developers. She managed her property herself before leaving it to the National Trust upon her death.

She was also a naturalist, and it was her interest in mushrooms and toadstools that enabled her to produce hundreds of finely detailed and botanically correct drawings of fungi. Her drawings from the late 1880s to the turn of the century were donated for mycological and scientific inclusion to the Armitt Museum and Library in Ambleside, where mycologists still refer to them to identify fungi. Her collection of fungus paintings is in the Perth Museum and Art Gallery in Scotland.

I recently read a novel, The Shadow Sister, where one of the characters actually befriended Beatrix.