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In my nature journaling project for 2025, I am following the Japanese calendar of 72 microseasons (little ‘seasons’ of about 5 days each). I am painting a journal spread for each microseason I identify and writing a little description to accompany it. This year, I am using only art in this journal to convey the changes through the year, no dates and no words on the pages themselves. This is forcing a creative and responsive artistic method, new to my nature journaling practice so far.
Season #2 The Birch Woodland Recedes Indefinitely
Walk the birch woodland in midwinter and experience space unfold. It is the trees themselves, impediments to the spaciousness, that actually give rise to the sensation. Look into the distance and the shapes of trees seem to go on indefinitely; even as the hills in the distance can be seen through them, the hills somehow appear too far away. In front, the trees expand into the distance in a parallax of olive green and brown.
Birch trees are early pioneers. They like to be the first arboreal arrivals on new frontier, and are usually soon succeeded by more solid and imposing trees – your oak, beech, and ash. So a woodland like this, which is nearly all birch – nearly all surprisingly old, twisted, eyed, and moss-laden birch – is unusual. The colour-scape is green-brown. Yellow-green of the thick mosses. Blue-green of the bilberry bushes overwintering in stemmy masses on the woodland floor. Olive-brown-green of the many trees in the distance, moss and trunk blurring and receding toward those faraway hills.
Look up and the colours shift to red. Birch trees have wonderfully red new growth, so the stems against the white wintery sky alter the sensation of colour. Follow a silver trunk upward with your eyes from the mossy green of the base to its red extremities in the sky. And wonder as it watches you back from the many eyes on its trunk that look out from twists and curls. It watches you from an expanse of time and space, as all trees do.
The Page
The Process
Very slowly and carefully, the shapes of the birch trees were painted using the Derwent Inktense Studio Pan Set with a very fine brush. I used a combination of Tan, Ionian Green, and a bright green (Kiwi) in this, together with Natural Brown and a Burnt Umber Inktense pencil (scribbled on separate paper used as a palette).
There is real birch bark on these pages. I collected fallen scraps from the base of a paper birch tree in my sister’s garden many years ago. It took a long time (a couple of years in a press) for the scraps to stop resisting my attempts to unfurl them and give in to a new flat existence. Once they were fully dry and flat, I moved them into a ‘scraps box’ and from there onto this page. They were carefully cut out using a tracing method (find out how in the video below) and glued down onto the painting using EVA glue.
The Video
You can watch the process in the final part of this vlog (from 12:35).
Want to have a go yourself? The Nature Journaling Circle membership is a welcoming space for you to learn field sketching and other nature journaling skills with me. There’s a monthly live tutorial and a social session, plus access to all my pre-recorded video courses and a community of lovely nature journalers from around the world. If that’s something you might be interested in, consider joining us here.
