Start with the walk you already do

The most useful nature journal is rarely the one kept on a glorious day out in the hills. It is the tatty notebook that lives in your coat pocket on the same twenty-minute loop you walk most mornings. Familiar ground is not dull ground — it is the only place where you can genuinely notice change, because you know exactly what it looked like last week.

So choose one route and commit to it for a season. A suburban footpath, a canal towpath, the edge of a park, even the same stretch of pavement with its weeds and wall moss. Walk it at roughly the same time of day where you can, because light and wildlife behave very differently at eight in the morning and at four in the afternoon. By the third week you will begin seeing things you have walked past for years.

The kit that earns its place

Keep your kit small enough that you never leave it behind, and cheap enough that you are not precious about it getting rained on.

• An A5 hardback notebook with plain or lightly dotted pages — small enough for a coat pocket, sturdy enough to lean on. Avoid anything with pre-printed boxes; they tend to make you fill in fields rather than look properly.
• A 2B pencil and a fine waterproof pen. Pencil for sketching, pen for writing over damp paper.
• A small tin of watercolours or half a dozen coloured pencils. Useful for recording a colour accurately — the particular grey-green of a lichen, the rust of a beech leaf in November.
• Your phone camera. Use it for record shots and for things that will not sit still: a wren, a hovering kestrel, the exact shape of a cloud bank.
• A couple of paper envelopes and a small tin for anything you intend to press or keep.

A ten-minute routine

The habit survives on simplicity. At the start of each walk, write four things at the top of a fresh page: date, time, weather, place. That is it. Then aim for three small contributions before you get home.

• One thing written. A sentence or two is plenty — what is in flower, what is singing, what has changed since last time.
• One thing drawn. Sixty seconds is enough. Draw a single oak leaf, the outline of a contrail, the pattern of puddles on the path.
• One thing recorded. A photograph, a rubbing of bark, a pressed leaf, or simply a note of something you want to look up later.

Ten minutes, no more. A journal you keep for a year beats a beautiful one you abandon in February.

Sketching without pressure

The point of drawing in a nature journal is not to produce art. It is to make you look for long enough to actually see. Start with the overall shape rather than the detail — the teardrop of a leaf, the wedge of a bird's wing, the way a branch forks. Get that down, then add the midrib, the serrations, the markings. If you are short of time, do a contour drawing without lifting the pencil from the page; it forces your eye to travel slowly.

Annotate as you go. Write the name if you are confident, and a question mark if you are not. Add the size, the colour, the smell, the sound. Draw the same tree once a month from the same spot and you will end up with a record far more interesting than any single perfect drawing. A wobbly sketch with good notes is worth ten neat ones with none.

Small finds and how to keep them

Pocketing things is part of the pleasure, but do it thoughtfully. A fallen leaf, a hollow acorn cup, a fragment of eggshell on the ground, a seed head, a moulted insect casing — these are fine to take and lovely to keep. Photograph rather than collect anything else: leave feathers, birds' eggs and wildflowers where they are, and never dig up a plant.

Label as soon as you get home, while you still remember. Write the date and place on a paper envelope or slip of paper and keep it with the find, then press flat leaves between sheets of newspaper under a couple of heavy books. Store the collection in a small box and draw the find before it wilts or curls — a fresh specimen is far easier to sketch than a dried one.

Keeping it going through the year

Each season gives you a different job. Winter is for silhouettes, tracks in mud, frost patterns and evergreens; bare branches are the easiest time to learn tree shapes. Spring is for bud burst, first chiffchaff, blackthorn blossom and frogspawn. Summer rewards you for looking up — canopy shapes, grasses, bees and butterflies. Autumn brings galls, berries, fungi, seed heads and the slow turn of colour.

Keep a page at the back for firsts: first swallow, first ripe blackberry, first frost, first daffodil. Compared year on year, that single page becomes the most valuable thing in the book. And if you miss a week, or a month, simply write the next date and carry on. The journal is not a test — it is a quiet record of a place you know well, kept by the only person who walks it quite the way you do.