The Magical World of 'Miss Potter'

LONDON, Jan. 23, 2007 — -- For centuries, painters have been inspired by the mysterious light in England's Lake District. This national park on England's northwest coast is known for its stunning scenery, abundant wildlife and cultural heritage.

It was there that the poet William Wordsworth wrote that he "wandered lonely as a cloud." And it was there that Beatrix Potter, the author famous for her "Peter Rabbit" children's books, imagined the character Jemima Puddle-Duck searching for a place to lay her eggs.

"I just saw Jemima Puddle-Duck's gate. It's great," squealed an excited Serena Hopper from Australia as she shopped for souvenirs at Potter's Hill Top Farm. Hopper also had lunch at the fabled Tower Bank Arms, which features in Jemima's tale. An estimated 15 million tourists visit the Lake District, every year and "Miss Potter," the movie, will undoubtedly bring more.

And those who come to the Lake District will realize that there was a lot more to Potter than bunnies in blue jackets and a tragic love affair.

"Lots of things about her life I found completely astonishing," said the director of the movie, Chris Noonan. "There are so many things about her that go way beyond your preconceptions, or way beyond my preconceptions, anyway."

Generations of fans grew up with Peter Rabbit and his friends, but few people know, for example, that Potter started drawing fungi when she was a lonely 8-year-old. Her nature drawings are now on display at the Armitt Gallery, a few miles down the road from her farm. They are a long way from fluffy kittens.

There are intricate reproductions of mushrooms and fungi, a watercolor of bats in a barn. Fish. Frogs. Apparently, Potter even dissected rabbits and frogs, just to see how they moved.

"She was absolutely an expert," said gallery director Karan Herington-Howell. "She probably hasn't been equaled, even today."

But her drawings and paintings lay unpublished until the 1960s, long after Potter had died. And the paper she wrote in the early 1900s, explaining how lichens were formed, has been lost. She wasn't allowed to present it to a venerable London scientific society because it only admitted men.

Ahead of Her Time

It all might have been very different had Potter been born in more enlightened times.

"She would have been a scientist," said Herington-Howell. "She would have been a marvelous scientist, and it's very likely that she wouldn't have the legacy of these wonderful children's books that she left behind."

But Potter has left behind much more than books, and given us more than childhood memories of having her stories read to us as we drifted off to sleep.

When the royalties started pouring in from "Peter Rabbit," Potter used the money to start buying the land in the Lake District that first inspired her. Her initial purchase was Hill Top Farm, where tourists enjoy Jemima's gate and many more real-life scenes that inspired her work.

'A Visionary in Her Own Way'

"You could see walking around, the quiet that it brings," said Renee Zellweger, who plays Potter in the movie. "The quiet that she probably craved and access to all those things that she liked most, the things that inspired her."

Potter wrote most of her books at Hill Top Farm, and with each book, she earned more money and bought more land. She purchased 13 additional farms -- 4,000 acres in total -- and when she died in 1943, she left it all to her country.

That land was given to the National Trust, which was founded by a friend of Potter's to preserve England's open spaces.

"She was a visionary in her own way," according to Jim Loxam, who now looks after all that land for the National Trust.

As Loxam looked out over lakes and mountains that would look very different had it not been for Potter, he reflected on her legacy as a conservationist. "I think it was more important than her books. Her books [were] a means to an end."

That end was life as a farmer with a fondness for tweed suits, a prize-winning breeder of rare Herdwick sheep, and an entrepreneur with en eye for the tourist dollar.

The Tourist Invasion

At Yew Tree, another Potter farm, Caroline Watson runs a tea room started by Potter back in 1930.

"At the time, it saved the farm from ruin, I believe," she said over tea and cakes in the farmhouse.

The sheep farming lifestyle was dear to Potter's heart, and she reportedly hated the tourist buses that, even then, were crawling into the Lake District from nearby cities. "I think she realized it was something that was happening in the Lake District," Watson mused. She said Potter's attitude was "Embrace it and make some money out of it."

Watson and her husband hope to make more money after surrendering their home to the movie makers. And the lakes might survive a "Miss Potter"-inspired tourist invasion, which could stretch well into the fall, since that's when the movie is expected to open in Japan.

That matters because these are the first English words most Japanese learn in school: "Once upon a time, there were four little rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter."