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

Journals have long stirred 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 Charles Darwin used notebooks extensively throughout their 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 positions the natural world as a kind of prototype for the yuckiness of maturity – heaps details on top of one another in a technique that mimics that of a nature writer. It lends coherence to the scrappy, corporeal phenomenon of transitioning from innocence to adulthood.

Recalled through childish eyes by the poet, an old flax-dam consists of things weirdly amalgamated or congealed: “But best of all was the warm thick slobber/ Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water.”  It is a place of strange, superfluous communion. Heaney captures perfectly the inextricable link between things needing to grow and the bulging, bodily horrors that come with it.

John Clare, a peasant who rose to fame in the nineteenth century for his nature poetry, was a fastidious and insatiable recorder of the natural world. Whilst journals and notebooks abound in our present day, paper was so hard to come by for Clare in his rural community that he stowed scraps in his hat for safekeeping. In one horrifying instance, his illiterate mother was said to have cast some of these papers, filled with his poetic musings, into the fire when wood was scarce.

Such was Clare’s wide-eyed appreciation of nature, he even created his own words from the Northamptonshire dialect to capture the idiosyncratic sights and sounds of the countryside. ("Crumping" was the sound for snow underfoot).  In his poem ‘The Nightingale’s Nest,’ Clare’s diligent arrangement of details seems to mimic the efforts taken by the bird to create it:

“How curious is the nest ; no other bird
Uses such loose materials, or weaves
Its dwelling in such spots : dead oaken leaves
Are placed without, and velvet moss within…”

 There is a willingness to identify with the perspective of the natural world in his conscientious foraging about for the most fitting imagery. Whilst many poets looked to classical influences or each other for inspiration, Clare’s creative debt was owed first and foremost to the landscape and wildlife he loved.

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 workings of his near-contemporary and celebrated antiquarian, John Aubrey (1626–1697). Aubrey’s huge body of work includes Brief Lives, an exhaustive collection of short biographical pieces about his friends and acquaintances. It is a masterclass in girding idiosyncrasy against obsolescence – a hallmark of journaling.

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

Carl Linnaeus (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 also reaped the fruits of 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 the Atlantic, the coastlines and interior of South America, the Galapagos, and many more oceanic islands.

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, underlinings and shorthand that led the historian John van Wyhe to term the notebooks “the worst” he had had to work with. Crucially, the notes posed more questions than they answered, stretching the intellectual potential of the voyage.

The effect of trying to capture the random or multifarious is that, often, organising principles 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.

These examples also suggest that as hodge-podge as our scribblings might first seem, their worth is largely dictated by what you choose to do with them afterwards. Even the most unsuspecting noticings can become crucial facets of a more over-arching theory or body of work. Nature journaling reminds us that the most ground-breaking systems are only ever a sum of their smaller parts.

There is an earnestness to nature writing that seems to come more purely from a desire to learn than a desire for performativity. Who it is written for seems to matter less than what it is intended to record, notice, appreciate or preserve. If you’re someone who struggles with feeling awkward, self-scrutinising or too unhelpfully pre-meditated when it comes to journaling, this might be a good place to start.

BY FREYA MORRIS