A Focus On Nature, Advent Calendar, Now for Nature
AFON
Beatrix Potter to Now for Nature – Tiffany Francis
Welcome to our 2016 Advent Calendar series (#AFONAdvent)! This year, our theme is “The Gift of Inspiration”. For each day, one of our members has written a blog post about someone who has inspired them, and how that inspiration has lead to them being where they are today. Each member is a shining example of a young person who is acting Now for Nature. We hope that you enjoy the series and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
A woman’s life in nineteenth century Britain would not have been easy; being a woman now isn’t particularly easy either, but we’ll save that chat for another day. The society in which Beatrix Potter grew up was a patriarchal one, where men voted, worked and had their say, while women stayed at home looking rather lovely. Perhaps if you were lucky you might have taken up amateur palaeontology or even joined the Plumage League in 1889, and created what we now treasure as the RSPB.
For most women, options were heavily restricted if you wanted to achieve anything vaguely within the realm of men. Beatrix Potter worked within these foolish restrictions to achieve great things that still resonate with both children and adults today; her work captured the joys of the natural world for generations to enjoy long after her death in 1943.
Beatrix Potter
First published in 1902, The Tale of Peter Rabbit was the first in a mesmerising collection of illustrated stories, detailing the private lives of anthropomorphised woodland and farmyard creatures. For millions of children like 
myself, it brought to life the secret creatures of the wild and gave them personalities, allowing us to understand that animals, like humans, felt happiness and pain. Benjamin Bunny, Jeremy Fisher, Pigling Bland and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle all ate supper, sought adventures and cared for one another, and the stories themselves were both gentle and amusingly moral, with most tales coming to a close within the cosy blankets of the characters’ beds.
In her own life, Beatrix Potter was also a scientific artist, mycologist, landowner and sheep farmer, and is credited with preserving much of the land that now belongs to the Lake District National Park. On her death, she left the majority of her property to the National Trust, as well as the original illustrations from her books. In an age where the countryside was being torn up for profit or land during the war, she understood the aesthetic value of the British landscape and felt an instinctive desire to protect it.
The front of the mainly c17th Hill Top, Sawrey, Cumbria, where Beatrix Potter wrote many of the Peter Rabbit stories
As a nature writer and illustrator, Beatrix Potter has always been one of my greatest inspirations. Her ability to capture the souls of animals within her paintings is something I have always endeavoured to follow, and we share a love of gentle anthropomorphism that is mostly harmless. If I could inspire and engage others in protecting the natural world as well as she could, I would be a happy lady, and it is particularly reassuring that most children born today will own a book or toy from the Potter collection, ensuring their earliest memories are positively connected with wildlife.
Tiffany Francis – soon to be a published book author
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