Inspiring Reasons to Keep a Nature Journal
Keeping a nature journal is far more interesting than keeping a diary, when you wallow on about your own life and woes. It inspired you to look in your own backyard, garden or park or by the beach, to be amazed at the creatures we share England with, and even further afield.
Here are some beautifully inspiring books by nature writers and artists, perhaps to inspire you to do the same!
Use with eco-friendly drawing pencils or natural vegan watercolour paints.
Discover the Art of Field Sketching is a book by a woman who has taught children and adults to draw single items in nature to large mountain vistas. She has been leading workshops in remote Alaska for over a decade, and now her course is available as a book.
Start with the basics of pen, pencil and watercolour, then learn to sketch a night sky, backyard bird or a squirrel in the park. The book includes 30 easy lessons, and inspiring examples of finished work. And also looks at the benefits of slowing down to sketch the natural world.
Green Sketching (with a climate scientist)
The Green Sketching Handbook offers inspiration from not just an artist, but a climate scientist, asking you to let go of worries, and lose yourself in nature.
Combining quick and easy exercise and research on the benefits of nature, Dr Ali will show you how to embrace your wobbly lines, and learn about your relationship with the natural world, to bring comfort and joy.
52 Journal Spreads from a Botanical Artist
A Perpetual Journal Practice asks you to accept an invitation to connect with nature, with botanical artist Lara Call Gastinger, who teaches artists on how to develop a rich mindful practice, using 52 of her own full-page journal spreads.
From how to number each page spread in a fresh blank journal, to tips on bringing those blank pages to life through art, this is a powerful book for naturalists who seed a deep and personal understand of nature and the healing of green spaces.
52 Invites to the World of Forest Bathing
Your Guide to Forest Bathing contains fifty two invitations for practice and introspection amid the trees of your local forest or park. Tune into your senses and the subtle rhythms of the natural world, and bask in the wonderful sensory symphony of nature.
And become adept at discovering what invitations, the forest is offering to you!
Deepen Your Connection with Nature
Keeping a Nature Journal is a beautiful book, that has been revised for over 20 years, such is its popularity. Used by schools to art teachers, this features selections from the author’s own journals (which she’s kept for 40 years) plus prompts and step-by-step drawing techniques, to observe the natural world around you, even right outside your door.
Learn how to hone observation skills, and find lessons to draw plants, trees, birds, animals and landscapes. Clare Walker Leslie is a wildlife artist, writer and educator who has been teaching people how to observe and draw nature for over 30 years. She lives in Massachusetts and Vermont, USA.
An Artist’s Year of Field, Forest & Coast
From Field & Forest offers an artist’s year in paint and pen, a book of flora and fauna from the fields and forests surrounding the artist’s home. In this mindful art journal, Anna celebrates the changing of the seasons, the blossoming of flowers and the ripening of fruit.
Working in watercolour, her illustrations are reproduced in beautiful detail and accompanied by musings and observations of the natural world. Whether drawing wasps feasting on apples (fallen from the orchard) or capturing the cerulean blue of a winter sky, you are sure to be inspired.
Also read From Coast & Cove, which gives more inspiration as Anna and her family move from East Sussex to the Devon seaside.
Now she finds inspiration from the ebb and flow of the tide through the year, the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore and creatures spotted in the air, on land and in rockpools.
From the haunting cry of the curlew (heard while kayaking along the River Dart) and the iridescent scales and pointed teeth of a hake, to the mussel shells discarded by an oystercatcher and the kelp, wrack and eelgrass strewn along the beach.
Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal
Leaf, Cloud, Crow is an illustrated journal to guide observations of nature in gardens and yards, city parks and vacant lots, or even the sky, enhanced by inspiring prompts from the author.
What do the bare branches of winter allow you to see? How does summer’s abundance provide for different wild animals, and can you find abundance in your own life? What changes have you noticed in natural habitats near you – not just from month to month, but from year to year?
Grow more attuned to all the ‘radiant things bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world’.
A howling love letter to the world, the story of what we’ve lost and what we can save and the abundance of wonder in our own backyard.
Secrets from a Devon Wood (a nature diary)
Secrets of a Devon Wood is a treat for the senses, with exact replicas of illustrations that the artist makes of discoveries she finds in the wood behind her Devon home.
Jo Brown began keeping her nature diary because ‘thing of such magnitude deserve respect and understanding, and deserve to be remembered’.
In enchanting and minute detail, she zooms in on a bog beacon mushroom, a buff-tailed bumblebee or a native bluebell. And notes facts on physiology and life history.
This book is a hymn to the beauty of the natural world, and a quiet call to arms for all of us to acknowledge and preserve it. A book that will stay with you.
These beautifully illustrated notes are not polished essays, but real-time records to capture the first-hand wonder that the author feels when spotting beetles, fungi or ferns, in her own patch of woodland.
These drawings are straight from Jo’s personal sketchbook. Plants, feathers, and insects sit alongside handwritten notes. There is as much detail on a simple leaf, as a fox or owl.
The idea is to encourage anyone with a notebook to slow down, and look at the ground beneath their feet, to discover nature on the doorstep.
You’ll also learn a lot. Latin names beside common ones. And you’ll learn when certain species bloom. Learning about mosses to wildlife feels like a gentle chat, not a lecture.
Discover how one wood changes with the seasons, as Jo visits the same patch day after day, spotting small shifts that many people miss.
Brown’s work celebrates local nature rather than far-flung destinations. She shows Devon’s woodlands as places full of hidden drama and beauty.
This focus speaks to anyone in England who wants to connect with their own local patch, no matter how ordinary it seems at first glance. The result: more people feel encouraged to protect and appreciate neighbourhood wild spaces.
Readers of all ages see how to start their own journals—even without fancy art supplies or years of training.
