Why autumn suits a daily notebook better than any other season

Autumn is the most restless season in the British calendar. A single horse chestnut can go from green to gold to bare in under a month, and the mornings shift by a noticeable minute or two each week. That pace is exactly what makes a nature journal worthwhile. If you only look at a tree occasionally, you see snapshots; if you look every day, you see a story with a beginning, a middle and a bare-branched end.

The good news is that this is not a project that demands talent. A nature journal is simply a dated record of what you noticed. Weather, wildlife, leaves, the state of the hedgerow — written down in ten minutes, it becomes a personal archive you will still enjoy reading in February.

Choosing a notebook that will actually get used

Fancy notebooks discourage daily use because they feel too precious to spoil. Choose something modest and durable instead, and keep it near the door or in your coat pocket.

• A5 hardback notebook with plain or dotted pages, so you can sketch a leaf outline without ruled lines fighting you.
• A fine-liner pen and a soft pencil. Pencil is better for quick leaf rubbings and for notes made in drizzle.
• A small tin or envelope tucked in the back cover for a pressed leaf, a few seeds or a sprig of dried yarrow.
• A cheap thermometer on a north-facing windowsill, if you want your weather notes to be more than guesswork.

You do not need a watercolour set or a camera. Most people who keep a journal for years record more in pencil and words than in paint.

A ten-minute daily entry you can keep up with

Consistency beats detail. Try to write at the same time each day: with your first cup of tea, or straight after a short walk round the block. A workable entry covers five things.

• Date, time and place — even "back garden, 7.40am" is useful.
• Weather — temperature, cloud cover in eighths, wind direction, and whether there was dew, mist or the first frost of the season.
• Wildlife — birds on the feeder, a red admiral on the last buddleia, hedgehog droppings on the lawn, the evening movement of swallows heading south.
• Plants — what is flowering, fruiting or fading. Blackberries, sloes, rosehips and elderberries all have reliable windows.
• One sentence of feeling — "smells of wet leaves and woodsmoke" is a perfectly good observation.

Write in note form. A list of eight short lines is worth far more than a paragraph you never finish.

Tracking the turning of the leaves

The heart of an autumn journal is leaf change, and it is best done on a small, fixed set of trees. Choose three within easy walking distance — perhaps an oak, a silver birch and a field maple — and check the same branches each day.

Note the date you first see colour, roughly what proportion of the canopy has turned, and the date the tree is bare. A simple scale works well: 0 fully green, 1 a few tinted leaves, 2 half turned, 3 mostly gold or russet, 4 bare. Add a sketch of one leaf a week, drawn life-size, and press a good specimen beside it. Over a few years you will build a record of how your own street shifts with the weather.

Turning your pages into crafts and seasonal styling

Once you have pressed leaves and seed heads, the journal naturally spills into the house. Pressed specimens are the simplest autumn decoration there is:

• Pressed-leaf cards and labels — leaves dried for two weeks between newspaper and weighted with books keep their shape and can be glued onto plain card.
• A simple garland — thread dried leaves, conkers and seed heads onto garden twine with a needle and hang it across a mantel or doorway.
• Glycerine-preserved leaves — soaking leaves in one part glycerine to two parts water for a few days keeps them supple and glossy for wreaths.
• A seasonal nature table — a tray of conkers, sweet chestnuts, dried grasses and a few jars of saved seed, arranged with a couple of open journal pages.
• Leaf and seed-head prints — brush the underside of a leaf with acrylic paint, press onto paper, and roll into a runner or wrap for jam jars.

Keep it relaxed. The point is to let the season indoors, not to produce a magazine spread.

Keeping the habit through to winter

Autumn fades quickly, and the temptation to stop arrives with the first hard frost. Push through it. A journal kept into November records the last leaves, the arrival of redwings and fieldfares, and the first truly cold morning — all details that make the following spring far more interesting to read back on.

Leave the notebook open on a kitchen surface rather than in a drawer, and forgive yourself missed days. A gap of three weeks does not ruin a record; abandoning it does. Start tomorrow morning with the weather and one tree, and let the season write itself.