Early in life, Beatrix began drawing both fauna and flora, and she developed a particular interest in fungi of which she completed over 300 paintings. The main influence on her interest was family friend Charles McIntosh, a postman at Dunkeld who had a fascination with the fungi and ferns that he would observe as he walked his route each day.
By 1888, Beatrix was regularly painting fungi and Charles would collect samples together for her and send them to London in Winter for her to paint. Her passion is evident in her writings, for example of a specimen she found in Hatchednize Wood – '...joy of joys, the spiky Gomphidius glutinosus, a round, slimy, purple head among the moss which I took up carefully with my old cheese-knife.'
She became very knowledgeable, drawing intensely detailed studies of the fungi and without doubt she stands out as a woman ahead of her time. She was the first person to manage to sprout other fungi with Basidiomycetes and was also one of the first to be aware of the symbiotic compound nature of lichens. She shocked the scientific world by, as a woman, making independent experiments and developing theories.
In 1897, she submitted a paper about her discovery of a new way to grow spores, to the Director of Kew, William Thiselton-Dyer, accompanied by her influential and supportive uncle, Sir Henry Roscoe, Vice Chancellor of London University. She was not, however, allowed to present it in person to the Linnean Society - as women were not permitted to attend the Society's meetings - and, no doubt through professional jealousy, her claims were not given the attention they deserved and were essentially dismissed.
