Winter Reveals What Summer Hides

When the last leaves come down in November, plenty of nature journalers quietly pack their pencils away until spring. That's a shame, because the leafless months are arguably the best time of year to properly learn how a tree is put together. Without foliage in the way, you can see the architecture — the lean of the trunk, the way the branches divide, the texture of the bark — and once you've drawn those things, you'll recognise the species at a glance for the rest of your life.

Think of it as a seasonal trade-off. Summer gives you colour and mass; winter gives you structure. A February page of ash, oak and birch will teach you far more about identification than a dozen midsummer drawings. It's also a lovely excuse to be outdoors in the quietest, most legible part of the year.

Dress for It and Keep Your Kit Simple

Cold hands ruin drawings, and British winter sketching means damp as much as it means cold. Sort the clothing first, then the pencils. A few things that genuinely help:

• Thin liner gloves with the fingertips cut off, plus a spare pair in a pocket for when the first ones get wet.
• A hard-backed A5 or A4 sketchbook — soft covers flap about in the wind.
• Two or three graphite pencils (2B and 4B cover most needs), a fineliner around 0.3 or 0.5mm, and a putty rubber.
• A sit mat or lightweight folding stool, so you can work at eye level with a trunk rather than craning upwards.
• A flask and a waterproof for the sketchbook. A clear plastic wallet costs pennies and has saved many a page.

Work in short bursts. Twenty to thirty minutes is plenty in January, then walk on to warm up and find the next subject.

Start With the Trunk

Newcomers almost always begin with the twigs. Resist it. The trunk is the easiest thing to get right and it anchors everything else, so draw it as a shape rather than a line — two edges, wider at the base where the root flare meets the ground, tapering gently upwards.

Before committing, hold your pencil at arm's length and compare the trunk's width to its visible height. Most people draw trunks far too thin, and too straight. Look for the lean, the swellings, the old wound where a limb came away, the ivy creeping up one side. British species give you useful clues: oak is often thick, heavy and forks low down; beech is smooth, grey and columnar; birch is slender and frequently multi-stemmed; ash tends towards a cleaner, paler trunk with a slight greenish cast on younger bark.

Bark: Texture Through Marks

Bark is where mark-making gets enjoyable, and where a little discipline pays off. Don't attempt to draw every fissure — pick a small square, perhaps five centimetres across, record the pattern inside it, then simply indicate that same texture across the whole trunk and let the viewer's eye do the rest.

• Oak: deep vertical fissures broken into rough plates. Short, angular, broken strokes, varying the pressure.
• Ash: ridged on older trees, smoother on young ones, with a faint diamond lattice on the branches.
• Beech: smooth, grey, almost elephant-like. Soft shading works better than lines; blend lightly with a fingertip.
• Birch: horizontal lenticels, drawn as tiny dashes rather than dots, plus the odd peeling curl of pale bark.
• Sycamore: flaking plates revealing paler bark beneath — render as small irregular shapes, not outlines.

Reading the Branching Pattern

Every species has its own handwriting in the canopy, and winter is when you can actually read it. Rather than drawing branches one by one, try drawing the negative spaces between them. Those pale gaps of sky are easier to judge accurately and they automatically give you a convincing silhouette.

Oak branches are crooked and gnarled, changing direction abruptly at each fork. Ash is more upright and sweeping, with buds in opposite pairs at the twigs' ends. Beech carries fine, dense twig growth that reads as a soft haze. Willow sprawls and droops. Work quickly first: a five-minute fineliner silhouette, hardly lifting the pen, then a slower study of a single branch junction where three limbs meet.

Finally, note the buds, because they're the real identification clincher. Ash has black velvety buds, horse chestnut has sticky brown ones, oak clusters them at the twig tips, and beech produces slim, sharp, coppery points. A few pencil notes beside your drawing will fix these in your memory far better than a photograph.

Return to the Same Tree

If you take one habit from this, make it this one: choose a single tree near your home and sketch it once a fortnight through to March. Same view, same rough time of day, always with the date and weather written on the page. You'll record the changing light, the movement of the twigs, the first swelling of buds and the arrival of spring, and you'll end up with a small, personal record of a year in that tree's life. It is, quietly, one of the best things a sketchbook can hold.