Reasons to Explore Nature On Your Doorstep
Stepping into nature, even just for a quick walk, brings visible benefits. Fresh air and gentle movement lift your mood and lower stress. The simple act of noticing birds or plants can help calm a racing mind. Studies show that spending time outside supports better sleep, boosts energy, and sharpens focus.
For children, wild play sparks curiosity and builds confidence. The outdoors becomes a giant classroom, full of learning and surprise. Adults find new friends through community clean-ups or gardening groups.
From a bigger picture, people who know their local green spaces want to protect them. Taking interest in local wildlife helps keep whole neighbourhoods healthier and happier.
Urban Green Spaces
City parks, tree-lined avenues, and pocket gardens are small havens for wildlife. Council flowerbeds buzz with bees from April right through until autumn. Community gardens offer a peaceful spot to grow veg or swap seeds with neighbours.
Neighbourhood trees help clean the air and give nesting spots for birds. Even a hot, busy high street often has bright planters full of pollinators in summer. These green spaces connect people with nature, even in the heart of the city.
Read our posts on pet-friendly and wildlife-friendly gardening.
Wildlife Corridors and Pocket Habitats
Wildlife doesn’t always need large woods or sweeping rivers to thrive. Disused railways, roadside verges, and even small ponds act as safe routes for animals on the move. These ‘corridors’ let hedgehogs, foxes, and frogs travel between parks or gardens.
Stretches of unmown grass bring wildflowers, which in turn feed butterflies and moths. A puddle on a path, or a patch of nettles behind a fence can shelter dozens of species. Every scrap of wild space counts.
Simple Ways to Connect with Local Nature
You don’t need fancy gear to start exploring. Here are easy ways to enjoy nature nearby:
- Take a regular walk along the same route. Watch how trees, birds, and seasons change.
- Try watching birds and wildlife (always from afar, to avoid disturbance).
- Join a community group for weekends tidying parks.
- Keep a nature diary — sketch what you spot.
- Teach children to notice small things, like tracks in mud or insects on leaves.
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.
A Weekly Backyard Nature 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.
Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee (USA).
A Search for Nearby Nature & Wildness
Local: A Search for Nearby Nature & Wildness is a beautiful ode to slowing down, and appreciating time spent in nature. Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, this book is by adventurer Alastair, who decides after years of travelling around the world, decides to explore the small map around his own local home.
We have just one tiny planet to live on. We must care for it, and use its resources wisely. This is my sole agenda, and I’m broadly of favour of anything that supports it.
So if we differ on specific points, it’s better to search for common ground where we can make positive changes together, rather than just shouting at each other on social media.
For more than twenty years, my favourite thing has been to leave here behind. Spin the globe, and off I go. However my mood has shifted. With the climate in chaos, I can’t justify flying all over the globe for fun anymore, burning jet fuel and spewing carbon for selfies.
If I love wild places so much, was I willing to not visit them, in order to help protect them?
Can this unassuming landscape with busy roads and city lights, hold any surprises for a seasonal trekker. Could one single map actually provide a lifetime of exploring? Surprisingly, the answer appears to be yes.
Despite all his years in remote environments, the author learns the value of truly getting to know his neighbourhood. A celebration of both nature and the outdoors, but also a rallying cry to protect the wild places on our doorstep.
Shows us that space is deep as well as side, and that one need travel only a few hundred yards to become an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.
This funny and wise book is dedicated to – as the Australian poet Les Murray once put it – being ‘only interested in everything’. Robert Macfarlane
Alastair Humphreys has written 14 books, including some for children. He has spent 4 years cycling around the world (46,000 miles through 60 countries).
He has walked across southern India, rowed the Atlantic Ocean, run six marathons through the Sahara, crossed Iceland, busked in Spain and visited the Arctic. He encourages you (if you can’t afford to buy the book) to reserve a copy at your library.
