The Evolution of Nature Journaling – And Why It Might Be Right For You

Journals have long solicited the human impulse to collect details. Nowhere is this more evident than in the phenomenon of nature journaling, or nature writing. 

Whilst figures such as Darwin used notebooks extensively throughout his life and career in a scientific vein, nature writing of other kinds has also helped to change the way we think about life.

Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Death of a Naturalist’ – which sets the natural world up as a kind of prototype for the ickiness of maturity – heaps details on top of one another in a technique that seems to mimic that of a nature writer. The flax-dam itself, recalled through childish eyes by the poet, seem to be a product of things weirdly amalgamated or congealed: “There were dragon flies, spotted butterflies/ But best of all was the warm thick slobber/ Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water.” 

This aggregative effect reflects the impulse that journaling rewards: that of collecting details that might otherwise be considered extraneous.

Conrad Gessner, a Swiss academic living in the 1600s, published within the space of just seven years a five volume (4,500 page) survey of the animal kingdom. This Historia animalium blended observation, fact, myth, fable. Its generous – almost frenetic – cataloguing of details resembles in some ways the modus operandi of his near-contemporary,  and celebrated antiquarian, John Aubrey (1626–1697). Aubrey’s compendious body of work includes Brief Lives, an exhaustive collection of short biographical pieces about his friends and acquaintances. It is a masterclass in shoring up minute details for safekeeping, lest they be lost to the passage of time. 

Although close attention to the natural world rewards wide-eyed, attentive enthusiasm, it also seems to compel a taxonomising instinct; or a search for truth.

Carl Linneaus (1707–1778) delineated the system of naming and classifying plants that is still used today; an endeavour born from his indefatigable note-keeping and travel writing in numerous notebooks, including his five-hundred page Manuscripta Medica.

Charles Darwin reaped renowned fruits from this kind of summative labour. Boarding the HMS Beagle in 1831, bound for the Southern Ocean, his prodigious note-taking enabled him to transform empirical knowledge and careful observation into a more theoretical system.

On his travels, Darwin accumulated hoards of fossils, specimens, and most importantly, notes. He travelled light, carrying only one notebook per excursion ashore, no more than 17cm by 13cm as he progressed through Buenos, Falkland, Sante Fé, and miles more coastline.

The compact nature of these notebooks might have encouraged a kind of stringency, or curatorial rigour, their limited confines demanding Darwin decide what was, and was not, worth inclusion. What largely resulted was dense, abbreviated notations, peppered with dashes, underlining and shorthand that led the historian John van Wyhe to terms the notebooks “the worst” he had had to work with. Crucially, however, what the notes did seem to raise was pose new questions, stretching the intellectual potential of the voyage.

The effect of trying to capture the random or multiplicitous is that, often, organising principles seem to prevail. There is some directional insight here into the working of the human brain.

Nature writing or travel journaling seems to make sense of our affection for the random, turning it into a means by which to identify patterns.

There is an earnestness to nature writing, in many cases, which seems to come more purely from a desire to learn, rather than a desire to be performative. If you’re someone who struggles with feeling awkward, self-scrutinising or too unhelpfully pre-mediated when it comes to journaling, this might be a good place to start!

BY FREYA MORRIS