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She produced some 350 highly accurate pictures of fungi, mosses and spores.
“It is all the same, drawing, painting, modeling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye. I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest things, last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the backyard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round."
Potter was fascinated by fungi and spent many hours drawing and studying them in detail.
She developed her own theory about the germination of fungal spores and even submitted a research paper to the Linnean Society in 1897. As a result of the Linnean Society's strict gender rules, she was not allowed to present it herself.
Potter's illustrations of fungi were so accurate that mycologists continue to use them for identification purposes.
Her mycological work can be found in the Armitt Museum and Library in Ambleside and the Perth Museum and Art Gallery in Scotland.
She was one of the first people to propose that lichens were a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae, an idea that was ahead of her time and later confirmed by modern science.
The idea of compound beings was quite unacceptable to the guardians of the Linnaean Society and the hostile reception was enough to keep Beatrix Potter out of the scientific society (a later attempt to present her work to the famous Kew gardens in London was also a failure due to similar apathy and gender bias). However the situation could not continue for long and in due course lichens were recognized as a symbiotic merger between fungi and alga.
~ from "Lichens, Beatrix Potter and Symbiogenesis"
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