Nature Journaling in January

Identifying trees in Winter.

I held my first Nature Journaling Club of 2026 on Saturday. A workshop I hold once a month at a local Community Garden. The forecast was terrible, and I half expected to be there on my own. But my lovely nature journalers braved spending two hours outside on a dreary January Saturday morning. Thankfully the weather wasn’t quite as bad as forecast.

January, and Winter in general is a great time of year to try and learn how to identify trees from their twigs. So armed with a bunch of twigs from different trees, I challenged the group to see if they could identify them. They did a pretty good job, and we spent the session sketching them and creating our own field guides.

I’m hoping these will be helpful for them, identifying the trees where they live.

Whilst chatting it reminded me of a project that I did with my daughter in the Winter of 2021. I’m re-shareing the post I made about it on my website below.

Branch Painting Friday

Every Friday at the same time in the Winter of 2021 (January through to March) my youngest daughter and I went outside and drew the same branch on our Bramley Apple Tree. Watching the changes not only of the branch, but also of the weather, the acitivity of the birds and the sounds of nature.

We called this nature journaling project #branchpaintingfriday.

This was a very grounding and interesting practice, that helped us create a pause in what had become very monotonous weeks. It was amazing what we noticed, even while the branch stayed the same for weeks, the sound of birds changed and the weather slowly changed around us. The seasons moving from Winter into Spring. All these interesting things are part of our trees environment and neighbourhood. We are also part of that, our tree feels like part of our family. Drawing the same subject over and over is a really valuable way to get better at drawing. I’ve found drawing and painting the same species every year, I get to know it and know how to portray it better each time.

Here are a few of my sketches.

#branchpaintingfriday by @raspberrythief

You can find the rest of them in a Flipbook

You can also find them on the project page here on my website.

In March of 2021 the RSPB asked if I would create a short video of our project for their #natureinlockdown feature. It was shared on their social media pages.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/58618f_fd2ab93979774d43b5b0afc2829368cb/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Sound captured on a snowy #branchpaintingfriday

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/58618f_de75772b1231458fbed3088443c964eb/480p/mp4/file.mp4

Why not give it a go at trying to identify and draw your local trees?

There are lots of resources out there to help you identify your local trees.

The Tree Council - Has a good article on how to approach identifying trees in Winter. You can also follow them here on Substack The Tree Council

TreeGuideUK - a great guide. Giving options of using tree shape, winter bracnches, buds etc. to help you identify your tree.

The Woodland Trust - Have some great spotting sheets, and kid friendly tree identification resources. They also have an app.

Trees are a subject that I return to again and again, I’ve done several projects and workshops centred around them which you can find on my website. There are also several tutorials on the Community tier of my Patreon membership about trees.

Happy sketching,

Angela

Images copyright Angela Hennessy ©2026

If you share or use any of the ideas here, please remember to reference me and link to my website.