Leaf, Cloud, Crow is a beautifully illustrated journal to guide your 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?
Respect space of wildlife (don’t use flash photography nor use magnifying glasses, which can harm creatures in sunlight). Don’t play birdsong, as this can confuse and attract predators. For art, use vegan watercolour brushes and paints and recycled art paper. For drawing, use recycled pencils.
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’.
The beautiful illustrations and collages by Margaret’s brother Billy compliment her writing beautifully and will be published alongside samples of Margaret’s wisdom. This is a book that reaches right into my heart about how important it is to slow down and truly see the natural world. Colorado Sun
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. Margaret Renkl is a singular, spectacular writer, and this book, like life itself, is a cause for celebration. Ann Patchett
Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee (USA).
Observing Nature on Your Doorstep
Nature on the Doorstep is a calming and beautifully written book, revealing the simple pleasures of paying attention to the natural world in one’s own backyard, over the course of a year. In weekly letters, the author shares the joys and curiosities of an ordinary patch of green in upstate New York, cultivated through the art of ‘strategic neglect’ – leaving things be instead of ‘trying to always help’.
From the first flowers of spring to cardinals singing in the winter, the author shows the magic of welcoming unexpected plant and animal life into one’s life. A paean to the richness we find when we stop to look and let be, the book celebrates the role that humble backyards have to play in both conservation efforts, and an expanded appreciation of the living world.
Angela E Douglas is a British entomologist who is Professor of Insect Physiology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York State.
Deepen Your Connection with the Natural World
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.
A Gorgeous Nature Journal from a Devon Artist
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.
Jo Brown is a professional illustrator from Devon, who graduated from Falmouth College of Arts with a BA Honours in Illustration. She works from her home studio to illustrate the natural world, working mainly with pen and ink.
An Artist’s Year of Field, Forest and 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.
Anna Koska is a freelance illustrator who specialises in fruit, vegetables and the natural world. She lives on the Devon coast, having spent many years in Sussex. She forest-runs and cycles, and is fervent in her efforts to supply the family with homemade everything.
