CAN SOMEONE LEND ME A RHUBARB LEAF?

Referring to herself in the third person, Beatrix described herself in 1925 as living ‘amongst the mountains and lakes that she has drawn in her picture books…She leads a very busy contented life, living always in the country and managing a large sheep farm on her own land. Her shepherd Tom Storey described her as ‘quite smart for her age…a bonny looking woman,’ robust at the start of her seventh decade. Ten years later, with ‘apple-red’ cheeks and blue eyes undimmed, she appeared ‘short, plump, solid,’ to artist Delmar Banner, who painted Beatrix’s best-known portrait–a tweedy Mrs Tiggy-winkle figure at a sheep judging on the Coniston fells. Other observers noted marked eccentricities in her dress: ‘the sacking she put over her shoulders in the rain,’ ‘the use of a rhubarb leaf on her had against the sun in the hayfield.’ Much to her amusement, a tramp on the Windermere ferry mistook Beatrix for a fellow vagrant. She dressed as she thought practical for a life spent in the fields, walking and watching. Banner described ‘a kind of tea cosy’ on her head and ‘lots of wool clothes.”

–Matthew Dennison, Over the Hills and Far Away: A Life of Beatrix Potter