Nature Journaling for People Who Can't Draw

There is a sentence in an old notebook that reads: The first blossom opened today. That is all.

There is a date beside it and, further down the page, a small drawing of the branch. At least, I assume it is a branch. The proportions are questionable, the leaves appear to belong to several different plants and the blossom itself looks as though it may have been drawn from memory by someone who had only recently encountered flowers.

It is not a good drawing. But I know what it was trying to remember. This, I think, is where nature journaling becomes interesting.

A nature journal can easily appear to belong to people who know how to draw. Look for examples and you will find pages filled with beautiful botanical studies, carefully observed birds and watercolours in which every feather seems to have received individual consideration. They are lovely, and I can lose a great deal of time looking at them, but they can also give the impression that before we record the natural world we ought to become reasonably competent at drawing it.

I don't think the birds care. The tree certainly doesn't. Perhaps the notebook shouldn't either.

What Were You Trying to Remember?

Before cameras could record almost anything we saw, a notebook offered another way of carrying an observation home.

A person walking somewhere might make a quick sketch because there was something about a plant they wanted to identify later. A date could be written beside the arrival of a bird. The shape of a cloud, the condition of a track or the flowering of something familiar might earn a few lines before the page was turned and ordinary life continued.

Some of those notebooks became important scientific records. Others belonged to people whose names we will never know and recorded things of importance only to them.

I find myself drawn to the second kind.

There is something intimate about a page that was never intended to become beautiful. A hurried line around the shape of a leaf can tell you exactly where somebody's attention rested for a few minutes. Handwriting becomes cramped because the observation was made standing up. Something is crossed out. The writer is uncertain about what they have seen.

Small brown bird. Red near the throat? Kept returning to the fence.

Perhaps the bird is identified correctly three pages later or maybe it just remains small brown bird forever. Either way, somebody noticed it.

A nature journal does not have to prove that we understand the world we are looking at. It can simply record the moment we became curious about it.

Draw It Badly

Suppose there is a beetle on the path. You have never seen one quite like it. The shell is darker than you first thought, almost black until the light catches it, and there is a marking across its back that you know you will forget if you look away. This is where drawing badly becomes surprisingly useful.

You make an oval for the body. The legs are a disaster. There are too many of them or not enough, and none seem to emerge from the place where an insect's legs should reasonably begin. But while trying to draw the marking on its back, you have to look at it again. Then again.

Was the line straight? Did it reach the edge? Was there another mark beside it? The drawing may not improve, but your looking does.

I think this is the quiet usefulness of drawing in a nature journal. The page does not need a successful picture. Drawing simply gives the eye a reason to stay.

A photograph can preserve a remarkable amount of information in an instant. I love that about photographs. Yet when I try to draw something, even badly, I encounter details that the camera can collect without requiring me to see them.

Words Can Do the Looking When Nature Journalling

There are things I would rather describe than draw. The colour of the sky before rain for example is one of them.

You could write grey, but often that isn't quite right. Perhaps the sky has the strange greenish cast that sometimes appears before a storm, or the clouds are dark underneath while their edges remain unexpectedly bright. Trying to describe the colour creates the same difficulty as trying to draw the beetle: you have to keep looking until you can decide what you actually mean.

A nature journal can be full of sentences like this. They do not need to become polished writing. Nobody is waiting for the finished version. You can write that the wind has begun turning the leaves over so their paler undersides are showing, or that the first rain made the dust smell different, and leave it there. Sometimes one sentence is enough.

This is something I particularly like about keeping small records of nature. We are so accustomed to believing that a notebook should eventually contain something substantial that a single line can feel unfinished. But if the purpose is to remember what happened, perhaps the smallest accurate observation is complete in itself.

The first blossom opened today. There is an entire season inside that sentence.

Keep the Date

The date may be the most important thing on the page. At first it seems almost administrative. You write it at the top because that is what people do in journals, and then move on to the interesting part. Its value arrives later.

Imagine that the tree outside your window flowers every year. You have lived beside it long enough to recognise the change, although you have never paid much attention to exactly when it happens. One spring you notice the first blossom and write it down. The following year, you do it again. Eventually there are several dates. Now the notebook contains something you could not have known when you wrote the first one. It contains a small history of that tree.

Perhaps one year it flowered unusually early. Another year you were away and missed the beginning entirely, so the entry reads already flowering when we came home. The pages do not form a perfect record because life rarely allows one, but over time they begin to reveal a pattern.

This is the sort of knowledge people once accumulated simply by remaining somewhere. It belonged to farmers, gardeners, fishers, walkers and anybody whose daily life brought them repeatedly into contact with the same patch of world. The knowledge was local enough to be almost useless elsewhere. A person might know when a particular creek usually rose or where the first frost settled in a particular field.

A nature journal gives us somewhere to begin collecting that kind of knowledge again. Not knowledge about nature in general. Knowledge about here.

You Don't Have to Know What It Is

Identification can be wonderfully satisfying. There is pleasure in learning the name of a bird you have been seeing for months, particularly when the name allows you to discover something about its life that you could not have guessed by watching it.

But naming can also become a strange threshold we place in front of attention.

We see something unfamiliar and immediately want to know what it is. Within seconds a phone can often provide an answer. Once we have the name, there is a temptation to feel that the encounter has been completed.

Sometimes I like leaving the name blank for a while.

Write what you actually saw.

Where was it?

What was it doing?

What made you notice it?

Later you will discover that the tiny holes appearing in a particular leaf belong to an insect with an extraordinary life cycle. Perhaps you will never find out.

The observation does not become worthless because the name is missing. There are people we recognise around our neighbourhoods without knowing their names. We know the person who walks the same dog each morning or the neighbour who waters the garden at dusk. Familiarity can exist before introduction.

The natural world can become familiar in the same way. You notice first. Names can come later.

A Notebook That Belongs Somewhere

After a while, a nature journal begins to acquire a geography. Certain things return.

The same tree appears across several pages. A bird becomes familiar enough that you stop describing it fully and simply record that it has returned. Rain leaves one kind of entry in summer and another in winter. Something that seemed worth noting in the first few weeks becomes so ordinary that you forget to mention it at all.

This is when the notebook begins to feel less like a collection of observations and more like a record of a relationship. The relationship is with a place.

It does not have to be somewhere spectacular. In fact, I think an ordinary place may be better suited to this kind of attention because familiarity gives us the chance to notice change. A landscape seen once can be beautiful. A landscape seen repeatedly begins to reveal its habits.

The Pages Don't Need to Be Beautiful

I would like to own one of those nature journals filled with delicate watercolours and handwriting that somehow remains elegant even when written outdoors. Mine would probably not look like that. Perhaps yours wouldn't either.

I think we should keep them anyway.

Let the bird be badly proportioned. Write around the smudge where rain landed on the page. Cross something out when you realise you were wrong. If a leaf falls between the pages and leaves a mark, perhaps the mark can stay.

A notebook that is actually carried outside will acquire evidence of having been there. Years later, those imperfections may be the things that make it worth keeping.

You may not remember the afternoon when a few drops of rain sent you hurrying home, but the page might. A hurried note can return you to a place more quickly than a polished paragraph because it was written while you were still inside the moment it describes.

The notebook becomes less precious as an object and more precious as a record. That seems like a good exchange.

The First Blossom

Imagine keeping such a notebook for several years. It does not need to be consistent. There may be months when you write frequently and others when the pages remain empty. You might even forget about it for an entire season and find it again while looking for something else. Then one morning you notice the tree outside has changed.

There is a blossom where yesterday you don't remember seeing one. You open the notebook.

The first blossom opened today. You write the date and maybe that's all you record.

Four days later, you turn back another year and find the same tree mentioned on a page you had forgotten, beside a drawing of a branch that still bears only a passing resemblance to anything botanical.

Now you know something. Not when spring officially began or when that species usually flowers. You know when spring came to this tree, in this place, during the small collection of years in which you happened to be there to notice it.

There are databases that contain infinitely more information about the natural world than one person's notebook ever could. But they do not contain that. That belongs to you and the tree.

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There is still something lovely about finding a story in the letterbox.

The Letterbox at the Cottage is home to The Print Circle bringing dòigh beatha to your door each month, together with a collectable art postcard, a personal letter from Julie Ann and access to the weekly audio stories of The Listening Room.

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