I will start with a little introduction about myself and how I began my nature journaling journey. My name is Carrie Rogers. I am a (soon to be) 35 year old artist and nature enthusiast from the UK. I am also married and have a 2 year old son who is at home with me each day. I have always been around nature from a young age through walks in the woods with my parents, feeding the ducks, visits to the seashore and visits to many national trust sites and castles all which are set in beautiful gardens and grounds. I will share with you a couple of nature specific memories I have from when I was a child. I remember having this little A7 notebook when I was about 6 or 7 years old, it was tiny but it had a popup Red Admiral butterfly on the inside cover (no idea where it is now unfortunately). I absolutely loved it and if I saw a Red Admiral in the garden I knew that I was correctly identifying it because of the pop-up in the notebook. This led me to want to identify more of the butterflies that came to the garden. I remember feeling a little disappointed that it was always cabbage whites (which is actually quite funny to me now, I don’t know why). Another memory is collecting conkers, acorns, pine cones etc. when we visited any woodlands, mostly a place called Sutton Park which is a 2,400 acre national nature reserve in the Midlands. It’s actually one of the largest urban parks in Europe and is made up of heathland, woodland, wetlands, marshes and has 7 lakes inside it and a Donkey Sanctuary. You can also find there, if you are lucky, a herd of wild ponies. My parents both have a huge love for nature so it’s this park where I spent a lot of my childhood learning from my parents the different trees, animals, insects and birds and I think without having this period of my life I wouldn’t be the person I am today. It definitely instilled my love for all things nature and subsequently steered my love for drawing and painting into nature too.
Me and my mom, aged around 3 years old, and me and my Dad, aged around 1 years old. This is the same garden in both pictures and also the garden I did all my very important butterfly spotting in!
So, fast forward to 2020 and here we are, I have my own little family to inspire and teach nature things too.
My Son Isaac, who was born in March 2018, enjoying the buttercups on the edge of the field.
A lot of people who follow my Instagram account (@carrie.rogers.art) will have seen the woodlands behind my house on my story posts. It is where I am doing 80% of my nature journaling at the moment (the other 20% being my garden). I would usually visit a lot more places but with the current pandemic we are very limited to where we can go. The woodland behind my house is a trust owned nature reserve It is 12 hectares of woodland predominantly made up of Oak, Beech, Horse Chestnut, Hazel, Birch and Alder. It also has grasslands and ponds and in spring is carpeted in native English Bluebells. I have been involved with this woodland for many years now. I am currently the Vice chair and I produce the quarterly newsletter for distribution to the local area to keep people up to date with the many conservation projects we have going on. We have a Bat box scheme which we regularly check all of the 47 bat boxes and record the species, size, gender etc of all the bats we find. We have twice yearly moth trappings run by a local naturalist group. All the moths that are trapped get recorded onto a database to help us keep an eye of changes in the environment and then set free. We also have a micro fungi survey that has been taking place during the last 4 years with over 250 micro fungi species recorded onto the database, as well as other small mammal, mini beast, bird surveys etc. I have been a nature illustrator for a number of years now, but I never put the two together, I would just record data and photographs for all of the surveying but it never occurred to me to actually do a nature journal. Which is crazy when you think about it!
Some shots of the surveying we do.
I think it was probably around September 2019 when I actually started painting things that I found in the woods but it was mostly just as A4 watercolour paintings without any kind of explanation to them other than ‘stuff I found in the woods’.
Mushroom studies from mushrooms I found in the woods and took home.
I went into an art shop in Birmingham around December time, I had earned enough rewards for my £10 voucher and I saw this little Khadi notebook 15cm x 15cm. I bought it with no idea what I would use it for. It wasn’t until January 2020 when I actually thought ‘wow, this would make a great nature journal’ and so it began.
The front cover of my journal.
I was instantly hooked on completing my nature journal each week and even though I had a lot motivation to get outside into nature I found myself with a refreshed sense of motivation. I felt a bit like I was seeing things with new eyes. Instead of just finding things for data I was finding things for art and, in a strange way, I feel like my nature journal is a new hobby even though it combines both the things I usually do, recording nature and creating artwork.
My nature journaling has given me a new level of….hmm, I don’t want to say peace because it sounds a bit cliché…but I find the whole process relaxing and very rewarding. 99% of the time that I go out I have my two year old son with me and he is an utter inspiration. Everything to him is fresh and new and exciting. The level of glee my child expresses from seeing a ladybird is absolutely joyful. I often think back to when I was a child a think ‘Yes! This is it, the wonder, the intrigue.’ I always want him to feel that.
Isaac and his beautifully innocent love for Ladybirds.
I love that we are able to go outside and spend time just finding stuff. He will be looking on the path in the woods and come running to me with the plainest pebble you ever saw and have the biggest smile on his face, exclaiming ‘WRROCKK!’ so proud of his find. He hands it to me to examine. I look, crouch down to him and we examine the ‘WRROCK!’ together, ‘wow buddy this is awesome! I LOVE it!’ His smile even bigger, he swipes the rock from my hand and into his pocket and runs off to find something new. I often add the little things he finds into my journal. I hope one day we will be able to read through them together and go over all our little adventures, and when he’s a bit older he can add his own little paintings and drawings into the journal too or even just start his own.
Nature journal page showing a snail shell that Isaac found and handed to me (I now have a rather large collection of snail shell treasures).
Nature journal page showing the first flowers of spring and some slime mould I found in my garden.
I think it is so important for kids to experience nature, at its rawest, dirtiest, smelliest, and wettest. Those are the memories that they will remember and will stay with them. I genuinely don’t remember playing as a kid unless it’s the memories of playing outside or in the woods (I have a vague junior monopoly memory, which we won’t talk about). Everything that I remember is butterflies, frogspawn, tree swings, feeding the ducks, paddling in streams, catching sticklebacks in nets, mud pies, lifting rocks and finding newts and creepy crawlies, watching for foxes, collecting shells at the beach. Those are the memories I wish for my son, not endless cartoons and video games.
Isaac playing in the mud.
Isaac having a good old sniff of some Jelly Ear fungus.
My nature journal has given me the platform to give myself time to relax and paint as a hobby not just for work and to teach my son about the nature around us.
A few people have said things to me in the past…oh you should watch him in the mud he will get dirty; there might be germs; don’t let him pick up snail shells they are disgusting; I can’t believe you let him hold a mushroom he could be poisoned (luckily I am fairly knowledgeable about these things so I know what is safe); I can’t believe you are taking him out in the rain…the list go on. And I think how sad it must be for the kids who just sit inside and play video games and don’t get to play in the rain or the mud or smell moss on trees.
I have had a lot of people say to me that they would love to start a nature journal but it’s never the right time of year or their art skills aren’t good enough, they don’t have time. It is always the right time to start a nature journal. Your artistic ability doesn’t matter, the journal can just be like a diary with nature doodles, or take photos and print them out, cut them out and write facts about it, how was the weather etc. You don’t have to spend hours outside you can just look out your window, what do you see? Record how a houseplant changes through the year, record what spiders come in your house.
Lastly I wanted to share some of my favourite poems with you, a snippet from a Byron poem and a poem by Mary Oliver:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more
- Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
How I go to the woods
Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.
I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.
Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.
― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
Find more of Carrie’s art on Instagram @carrie.rogers.art.