Children's Corner at the Beatrix Potter Gallery

Did you know that at the Beatrix Potter Gallery we have a nice cosy Children's Corner - with books and activities suitable for children of different ages?

We've been busy over the Winter making sure there are nice new books that reflect our theme for this year; "On holiday with Beatrix Potter."

We have a Maisy Goes on Holiday Story Sack - aimed at our younger visitors. If you don't know what a 'Story Sack' is - it's literally a story book in a sack (or in this case a lovely 'Herdy' Bag). The idea is that an adult reads the main story to the child and then they use the 'props' in the bag to re-enact or talk about the story. There is usually a more factual book included and a game to play also.

For younger children we also have a beautiful Beatrix Potter themed frieze with magnetic characters and objects on - creating stories in this way certainly fires the children's imaginations.

As our theme is 'Holidays' this year - we also have a wee suitcase that the children can pack and unpack with the kind of things they'd take on a seaside holiday!

One of our very special new exhibits this year in the Beatrix Potter Gallery, is the Natural History Cabinet; full of specimens that Beatrix and her brother, Bertram, collected. You can see butterflies, moths, beetles, dragonflies, but also shells, rocks and fossils. This cabinet has been very kindly loaned to us by the Beatrix Potter Society.

We've taken the theme of Natural History for the older children's books, including the wonderful true story of Mary Anning, a little girl who found a very important fossil.

Beatrix loved to scramble about looking for fossils while on holiday and she wrote in her journal about a conversation with an elderly gentleman that she met - which shows her magpie like collecting manner!

"He seems to think it positively improper to collect fossils from all over the country, but I do not feel under obligation to confine my attention to a particular formation [...]. I beg to state I intend to pick up everything I find which is not too heavy."

And of course, after all,  we are the Beatrix Potter Gallery and we shall have Storytellers in the Gallery reading Beatrix's lovely stories to both children and adults alike! So if you'd love to hear The Tale of Peter Rabbit read aloud  - please check with us when our storytellers will be in.

skeletons

Did you know that Beatrix Potter took two bird skulls on holiday with her?  We'll be revealing more about Beatrix Potter and her holidays at Hill Top and the Beatrix Potter Gallery this year.

The skeletons I've been looking at are those of winter trees up on Claife Heights on the west shore of Windermere. 

The larch branch looks creepily like an elbow.

Winter oaks against a backdrop of yachts on Windermere

The smooth bark of a grand old beech

As mentioned last week, we do get a lot of rain around here.  Rainfall is generally higher in the west of Britain which is not so good for sunbathing and BBQs but excellent for all sorts of mosses, lichens and liverworts.  We tend to take it for granted that our winter trees, rocks and anything which stands still for too long becomes festooned in cloaks of brilliant green - until someone comes from the dreary south or east and raves about them!

Moss tends to grow on the north side of trees.  This is shaded from the sun so doesn't tend to dry out.  So, if you're lost in a wood ........  The same applies to algae so woods often have a green tinge on their north side.  This is why I hadn't noticed the moss and ferns on this tree on Claife Heights before.  I usually do the walk from Claife Viewing Station northwards through the wood and then return along the lake shore.  One day I did it the other way round - a completely different view.

How many different types of moss can you find?

Rain, rain, go away...

As you may know, the Lake District is blessed with more than it's fair share of rain, and although it has been a mild winter so far, there has been no shortage of precipitation!

It's handy at this time of year to have a few 'wet day jobs' in reserve for when it's just too horrible to work outside, and one such job presented itself this week. 

Although we don't keep bees at Hill Top, we do have a beehive which can be found nestling under a big slate slab built into one of the vegetable garden walls. The alcove created by the slab is known as a 'Bee Bole' and was used in days gone by to keep traditional coiled straw beehives, known as 'Skeps', out of the rain. With the invention of modern waterproof hives, bee boles became redundant but many still survive in old walls around the country. There's even a National Bee Boles Register (of which the one at Hill Top is number 0034), where you can search for ones near you, if you're that way inclined.

Of course the straw skeps which once graced our bee bole are long gone but at some time in the early 1900's a 'modern' hive was put in their place. We know this because we've got a picture of it; it's on page 12 of 'The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck'.

Beehive top left

The view today. I know.....the hive's the wrong way round!

The most recent replacement for the modern hive doesn't quite fit in the bole, and one edge of it is exposed to the weather which means that every few years it needs repainting. I've taken it into my shed to dry it out and the next really wet day we get, I'll sand it down and give it a couple of coats of fresh paint ready for the new season. Funnily enough inside the hive was a small wasps nest, fortunately deserted!

Tiny wasps nest, no wasps!

Incidentally, did you know that the average worker bee makes just one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime of just five to six weeks? and to make a kilo of honey, bees have had to fly on average 90,000 miles?

I've got a few other wet day jobs up my sleeve including the big yearly seed order and various bits of machinery maintenance but I have a lot more 'dry day' jobs so lets hope the weather gods smile on us for the next few months and keep the rain to a minimum.

For my musical link this time, I could have gone for anything by the excellent Swedish band The Hives or maybe something by techno group Nightmares on Wax, but in the end there was only one choice.

And finally a poem by Ogden Nash-

I eat my peas with honey
I've done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife.

Bye for now.

Words and pictures by Pete the Gardener/Beatrix Potter.