In February 1847 Whittaker became a member of the Botanical Society of London and he swapped plant samples between 1849 to 1853 with its members. He then joined the Botanical Exchange Club and finally the Botanical Locality Record Club. By 1847 he had enough information to publish “a list of rare plants found in the neighbourhood of Breadsall, Derbyshire”. This contained a mixture of both rare and relatively common species, and gives a good information of the botanical variety of the area at that time. In 1857 he was the schoolmaster of ninety children at Breadsall in Derbyshire, a village whose inhabitants included the naturalists Rev. Henry Harpur Crewe and Francis Darwin. The school was funded by the Harpur-Crewe family.