July Nature Journal Pages

My July nature journal pages - nature from Yorkshire, UK, with drawings, notes and lots of nature...

Some glimpses into my nature journaling for July 2024 - showing some of my nature observations for the month - mainly from rural East Yorkshire in the UK.

It feels a bit weird to make this page as a kind of journal about my journal - but I hope that this peek inside my own personal nature journal will help to inspire you for your own nature journal with ideas about the sort of things you might like to journal about...

Click 'Play' above to watch me flick through my nature journal pages for the month.

You can take a closer look at all the pages below...

Nature Journaling for July 

July in Yorkshire started out cool but ended up hot - so there was an opportunity to see a few different things - I used my nature journal in the garden, with found items to journal at home, and to record a few sightings from when I was out and about...

Crocosmia nature journal page

At the beginning of July, these beautiful bright Crocosmia flowers were blooming in our driveway and some self-seeded just by the back door. They look so tropical, but in fact they're really hardy.

At the start of July, there were a few flowers around the base of each stalk and lots of buds to come - now as July ends, there are fewer flowers, and these at the top of the stalk while the flowers that bloomed earliest are now turning to seedpods (hopefully, I will get to journal them soon).

Sycamore seed pod nature journal page

At the beginning of July, I also found a sycamore seed pod on the ground in the fields - still green, I assume it had blown from the tree in the recent wet and windy weather as I don't think it was really ripe and ready. It was nice to take the time to really examine it closely and I tried to map out the lines of the veins.

The next couple of days were hot, but pleasant - so I enjoyed being out in the garden and journaling about some of my succulents which are growing in pots...

Sempervivum journal page with drawings

First, my Sempervivum, also called a 'House Leek' or 'Hen and Chicks' - I was very excited to see the lovely little pink flowers on it, growing up in tall towers, but also sad to look at it and the drooping leaves at the base wonder if this was its final swan-song. I researched, and yes, the plant will likely die after this flowering - let's hope it manages to spread its seeds so I can continue to enjoy its company in some way in the future!

Echeveria nature journal page

And then I took journaling sessions over two days to draw this Echeveria - I started out in the garden drawing on a chair in the sunshine, sat right in front of it, but the following day it rained and I had to pop out and take a photo from my chair so that I could continue my drawing. My drawing for this one filled my whole page (it's a large plant) so I had barely any room for notes.

Pink stripey orchid drawings in my nature journal

I drew this very pretty pink orchid from my windowsill, which was a fantastic opportunity to sketch how the flowers grew on the stem and also to take a closer look at the veins on the petals. The stripes are not quite symmetrical and they are slightly different on each individual flower, too!

Rough map listing all my nature sightings for the week

I decided to draw a map with my nature sightings out on my dog walks in the fields over the previous week - that week I'd actually seen quite a few interesting wildlife sightings including:

• a rat in the barley field
• Meadow Brown butterflies in a grassy meadow
• swallows and house martins swooping low over the barley field to feed
• lots of rabbits
• some terns
• some goldfinches
• a flock of lapwings (around 30) - this I was most pleased with, as although we often see a handful of lapwings and they live in the fields here, I've not seen a big flock here ever before. I think they only stayed a few days.

The map itself, I drew from memory and it was surprisingly hard to get it right (you can probably see all the rubbings out) - and I feel like it looks a bit dull as there's no drawings and no colour on it, but still, it's a very decent record of what I spotted and where on that week, so in that sense I'm very happy with it.

I also think that if I did the map again in the future, I could now base it on this one, and get it right much more easily.

The next few days were overcast and cool so I drew found objects, inside my house...

Broken shell - 'Common Whelk'

My first 'found object' was this interesting broken shell. I've had it that long, now, that I can't actually remember where I found it, but I love the interesting curvy shapes. I had to do some research to be able to identify which sort of shell it was - I believe it is a Common Whelk.

I call it broken, but in fact I think it's more worn by the sea - and I wondered how long it had been in the sea for to be worn and bleached out like this..?

Journal page with found tortoiseshell butterfly

My second 'found object' was this tortoiseshell butterfly that I found a few weeks ago on the pavement at the side of a busy road. I think it had been squashed a little, either by someone's foot or a tyre. I felt sorry for it!

I drew it squashed, and also studied the detail of the pattern around the edge of its wing. I got my magnifying glass out and had a really close look at the tiny, tiny butterfly scales on the wing that make up the coloured surface. Butterflies are also surprisingly hairy!

Red Valerian flower

Red Valerian seed head

I did a two-page spread across two days for the Red Valerian flowers from my garden. I looked at a flowering stem on the first page and a 'spent' stem with tiny seed pods on the second page. That was interesting as I'd never really looked closely at the Valerian seedhead before. It spreads its seeds through tiny white, fluffy parasols - or maybe parachutes, shooting the tiny seed in to land. I can see now why it self-seeds so freely in suitable areas - ours likes to grow in the gravel in the sun.

Nature journaling the pineappleweed plant

In the second half of July, now, the weather has turned much hotter. I journaled this lovely little pineappleweed, which we see lots of out in the field and I also discovered in my garden! The best thing about this little 'weed' (and how it got its name) is its scent of pineapple!

It looks like it has no petals, but those little 'buds' are the full flower - I discovered one of its common names is 'Rayless Mayweed' as it has no 'ray florets' in its flower. Each of those little 'buds' are actually made up of lots of tiny flowers!

Magpies in the tree - from memory

One of my highlights for my July nature journal has got to be these two lovely magpies, which I watched (quite close) in my mum's garden. They were inspecting a hole in a very old apple tree. It was wonderful to see them and so I recorded them from memory in my nature journal.

Weekly nature observations with sparrow, frog, and bees

I made a page for the nature I'd seen in my garden the previous week, which was a hot one - so I'd been lucky enough to see some wildlife trying to cool down, including a lovely little house sparrow splashing about in our garden pond (which is a plastic half-barrel with some irises and other aquatic plants) plus a frog having a little rest half-in and half-out of the water. I was also pleased to see a bumblebee enjoying the flowers on the hebe - there've been so few bees and butterflies this year, so far.

Barley nature journal page

The field behind my house is filled with barley crop, as it is most years, so I thought I would journal a stem of barley that I found broken on the edge of the footpath. It was interesting to take a closer look at a single stem of barley, rather than experience the field as the whole crop of barley, all the stems together - and also to see the way the grains grow and those long barbs.

Cinnabar moth caterpillar and ragwort

I drew this cinnabar moth caterpillar and ragwort plant from a photo I'd taken a few days previously out in the fields on the dog walk. We'd been looking for cinnabar moth caterpillars on the ragwort, as we see them every year - and so I was excited to see one, as the flowers have been out a little while and its the caterpillars only food plant - they eat it as its so toxic and so they become unpalatable and toxic by eating it.

I've not seen so many caterpillars as usual, but it may just be that it's a little early yet. Will have to wait and see!

Weekly nature observations in my journal for week ending 27th July

The final full week of July was a warm and humid week, but often overcast. My main wildlife excitement of the week in my garden was two butterflies, which I included in the Big Butterfly Count for Butterfly Conservation. I'd spotted a lovely Gatekeeper butterfly (also called the Hedge Brown butterfly) on my hebe flowers, plus a Green-veined White in the same spot.

I've not seen many butterflies at all this summer - but since spotting these, I have seen another Gatekeeper butterfly close by (possibly this same one again) and one sunny morning many little brown butterflies fluttering all along the hedgerow along with a couple of Large White butterflies too. I'm hoping that with the poor, wet weather earlier in the summer, we may just be slow to get going with the butterflies...

I also saw a nice male blackbird who was smashing a snail shell on the gravel to try to eat it.

Crocosmia seeds journal page

After preparing this website page ready on the morning of 31st July, I decided to make my final July nature journal page, for 31st of July itself, another one about the Crocosmia, as I thought it would be nice to start and end the month with the same subject to observe and see how far it had come in the month, seeing as I'd already noted that it would be good to journal it at this different stage and notice the difference...

So here we have the little seeds for the Crocosmia - I don't know if these are the seeds or maybe the fruits or the seedpods. I do wonder if the little seeds themselves are inside the fattening green globes. Maybe this is something I can find out in another few weeks as the seeds (?) themselves ripen.

I hope that my nature journal pages have helped to inspire you for your own nature journal and also shown you that nature journaling doesn't all have to be perfect artwork - I've done some drawings here which I'm pretty pleased with (and those are the ones that took me quite a long time), but also some which I know could be better - often quicker sketches and diagrams.

The point I do want to make though, is that pretty art in your nature journal is not the point of nature journaling - the point of nature journaling is the observing, the experiencing, and how you feel - in a word, it's the process, the act of actually doing it, and not what you end up with that's important.

It's still lovely to have that record to look back on though, even just at the end of the month, to see what I was journaling about just a few weeks ago does give that awareness of the seasons progressing...

Find out more about nature journaling here... Or find out more about my fun nature journaling course here!

You might also like to take a look at my nature art, here, and natural history illustration, here...

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Online Nature Journaling Course

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If you'd like to explore nature journaling more, please consider joining me for my 'Imperfect Nature Journaling' online course - I've called it this to remind us to nature journal for the process of connecting with nature to feel good and not to put pressure on ourselves to create pretty pages...

It's a series of 20 lessons or exercises that you can do in your own nature journal to help you try out different ideas and techniques to help you get the most out of your nature journaling sessions and understand what style of nature journaling is the best for you personally.

If this sounds like something you might like, you can find out more about the course here...