CHOMA recently acquired this beautiful book (Findlay's Wayside and Woodland Fungi), originally owned by microbiologist and author Hubert Lechevalier, featuring many of the mycological drawings by Beatrix Potter. Most famous as a children’s author, her early interest in and work with the natural world strongly influenced her later career as a well-known children’s author. In addition to fungi, she also drew plants and fossils.
Her fascination with mycology began in her 20’s. Her biographer Linda Lear (Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature) wrote the following of that interest:
Beatrix’s interest in drawing and painting mushrooms, or fungi, began as a passion for painting beautiful specimens wherever she found them. She never saw art and science as mutually exclusive activities but recorded what she saw in nature primarily to evoke an aesthetic response. She was drawn to fungi first by their ephemeral fairy qualities and then by the variety of their shape and colour and the challenge they posed to watercolour techniques. Unlike insects or shells or even fossils, fungi also guaranteed an autumn foray into fields and forests, where she could go in her pony cart without being encumbered by family or heavy equipment.
From that early interest, “Beatrix Potter developed a skill for culturing fungal spores and became convinced that macroscopic fungi like mushrooms and toadstools must grow from subsurface mycelia as do other molds. Further, she became attracted to the concept that lichens are a symbiotic combination of an alga and a fungus.” [Beatrix Potter, Conservationist | American Scientist, accessed March 6, 2025].
However, her attempts to present her research at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew were met with disdain and disregard by her male colleagues. Undeterred, she turned her endeavors to what she is most well-known for, creating the world of Peter Rabbit and all his friends.
Her enduring legacy is one of conservation, in the 4,000 acres she ultimately preserved in the Lake District of England and “gave the land to the nation via the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, an institution her father helped found.
Further drawings from Findlay's publication:
The files in this category are pulled from our collection of Biography Files pertaining to the lives and careers of many ASM members.
The electronic resources in this category are pulled from our records compiled on many past ASM presidents. Although not a complete catalog of files from every presidency, it includes a vast run. The complete holdings are listed under ASM Institutional Records Section 13: Presidents, Part II: Presidents.
The first two female presidents of the Society of American Bacteriologists (now ASM), pictured together at the SAB General Meeting in 1964. Photo taken by then archivist, Leland McClung.
The American Society for Microbiology was founded in 1899 as the Society of American Bacteriologists (SAB). In 1934, the Society created the position of Archivist, to which Barnett Cohen of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine was appointed.
SAB’s fiftieth meeting, the Golden Jubilee Meeting, was held in Baltimore in May of 1950. Cohen researched the archival records he had acquired and prepared Chronicles of the Society of American Bacteriologists 1899-1950, a brief history of the Society, including a photograph of each of the Society’s presidents. Copies of the volume were provided to each of the attendees at the meeting, courtesy of SAB’s publisher, Williams and Wilkins, and its printer, Waverly Press.
To celebrate its Centennial, ASM published a special issue of ASM News in May 1999.