By 1846 he was living at Breadsall in Derbyshire where he was a teacher at Breadsall Boys School. From here he exchanged letters with Sir William J. Hooker Director of the Kew Botanic Gardens. Because Whittaker had planed to write a number of books on British botany, and needed to exchange some of his Australian and related samples for that. Whittaker collected about 300 plants that were eventually acquired by Kew. Whittaker's collections from outside the U.K. are now in Kew Gardens. Whittaker had the species of sundew "Drosera whittakeri" named after him.