Nature journals have been on my mind lately. Really, they’re always on my mind.
The practice of nature journaling has been with me since I first started bird-watching at 12 years old. I’d go outdoors with a notebook, binoculars and a Rite in the Rain pen or pencil in tow. Then I’d take notes and make sketches, as detailed and as patiently as I could, of my observations of the nature around me.
Not long ago, adult coloring books became all the rage. People like them for the opportunity to relax, to express an artistic sensibility, to let go of the stress of work and family and finances and all the pressures of adult life.
Nature journals can provide exactly the same benefits, but with the added reward of getting outdoors. They’re slightly more artistically taxing than a coloring book — you have to create your own drawings rather than use existing patterns.
But nature journaling also provides lines within which to color: the guide of the actual nature observed, which asks only that you look at it and sink fully into its contemplation.
I first learned how to nature journal from the Young Ornithologist’s Club magazine, a publication of the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. My parents subscribed to it for my sister and me when we were children in England, living just outside London. The magazine’s pages were crammed with watercolors and pen and ink sketches and scribbles. Seagulls above the cliffs of Dover; jenny wrens dangling from a birdfeeder; avocets striding on their stilt legs through mud.
When we moved to the United States, we carried the stack of magazines with us. I recall many happy hot summer days sitting on the concrete floor of the cool basement, reading about how best to record the natural phenomena I loved.
I never considered myself good at drawing. My sister commandeered the visual art genes between us, and from there they seem to have skipped on down to my artistic young niece. But with the encouragement of the YOC magazines, I soon found that I could learn to draw.
My sketches didn’t need to be perfect to evoke a moment in nature, and later, to give me the information I needed to identify animals, birds and plants. I practiced by copying drawings from the Sibley Guide to Birds or following the instructions in books like Jim Arnosky’s excellent book “Drawing from Nature.”
So journaling has always been part of my life. Recently, though, my attention’s been particularly captured by a couple of British nature journal keepers.
In April, Robert Macfarlane, one of my nature-writing heroes, put out an essay about the journals he kept while researching his new book “Underland.”
Macfarlane’s notebooks are poster children for those who want to journal without focusing on the artistic quality of the result. They’re battered and stained. They’ve traveled to the depths of glacial crevasses and dripping subterranean caverns. They’ve hiked up mountains; they’ve been dropped and torn and submerged. They’re scrawled in simple, often hurried, black ink. They’re pragmatic, a necessary set of notes for later.
But how resonant they are, bringing us with each line and each blotch to the very spot where Macfarlane set pen to page. Their very hurry, their instantaneity, recreates place and time. He calls them, wonderfully, “part of the archive of a landscape.”
Diametrically opposite in style, though still occupying a basic sisterhood of notebookdom, are the journal pages of British artist Jo Brown, who posts her work on Twitter as @Bernoid. Recently, her nature journal went viral, racking up over 48,000 views on Twitter and earning her a feature on the BBC’s Newsround.
These lush color portraits spill across the page in extravagant exactitude. She focuses, not on breadth of exploration like Macfarlane, but on detail, on depth of observation, itself a kind of journey and adventure.
Focusing on one or two subjects at a time, Brown fills a page with a bog beacon mushroom, a buff-tailed bumblebee, or a native bluebell. She notes facts about their life history: “The flowers are narrow & darker than H. hispanica & H.x. mossartiana,” she writes. “Drooping stem. Almost all flowers are on one side. Sweet scent.”
Nature journaling seems to be more common among British naturalists than here in the United States. We too, however, have some brilliant examples as our patrimony.
We have, for instance, the great grand-daddy of American nature writing, Henry David Thoreau. Best known for his classic “Walden,” Thoreau also kept a daily nature journaling practice for decades after he left his cabin on Walden Pond, hardly missing a single day until six months before his death.
He kept a massive wall chart, too, of first flowerings and leafings of woodland plants, obsessively recording the changes around him as season passed to season.
Now, scientists are finding they can rely on Thoreau’s notes to study the impacts of global warming. The care of his notetaking, which he did largely for the deep, if taxing, pleasure of reaching closeness with nature, has left us a precise botanical record.
In contrast to the breezy parade of virtuosity that is “Walden,” Thoreau’s 2-million word journal was a quieter work of maturity. It “engaged him in a quest more enlightening and relevant today than the proud asceticism he flaunted throughout Walden,” writes Andrea Wulf in an insightful Atlantic article on the journal.
In our own time, we have the delicate and exuberant art of Clare Walker Leslie, whose book “Keeping a Nature Journal: Discover a Whole New Way of Seeing the World Around You,” written with Charles E. Roth, encourages all lovers of nature to take up a journaling practice.
Born in Pennsylvania, Leslie writes, “I still use my journals to stay grounded with something larger than my days — the outdoor world of the seasons.”
My own nature journaling practice has focused largely on two things: memory and seeing.
Memory, because I like to look back on the past. I love to catch a moment and pin it to the page, mine for always, not to be forgotten. It’s my way of pinning a butterfly or pressing a flower, without killing an insect or plucking a bloom. Without taking a thing from nature that belongs there and could bring others — from people to creatures to the air itself — a sense of the world in its right place.
And seeing. Nothing connects us to nature and its rhythms more fully than slowing down enough to actually look. To contour the details of the present in a sketch or in written notes; to be patient; to wait; to really learn to see nature in its prodigality of fractal detail.
My notebooks have traveled with me from the hills of my hometown in New Hampshire to the coastal cliffs of Seattle; from the craggy limestone mountains above France’s Gorges du Tarn to the deck of the R/V Heiser, owned by the Shoals Marine Laboratory off the coast of Maine.
One needn’t be anything at all to start a nature journaling practice — not a good artist, not a knowledgeable naturalist, not anything other than simply willing to walk outdoors, pen and notebook in hand.
As I’ve learned, as notekeepers throughout the centuries have learned, nature itself will teach you.