There are days when I bring something home from a walk without really knowing why — a leaf, a feather, a seed head, a twig carrying a little lichen — only that I want to look at it for longer. This piece began with a handful of oak leaves and became something about drawing, handwriting, nature journaling, and the small things we choose to keep.
The oak leaves I gathered recently were already beginning to turn, their greens fading into ochre, yellow and brown, some edges curling, some surfaces marked and mottled, and when I began to draw them I found myself seeing things that the photograph had allowed me to pass over: the slight asymmetry of one lobe, the way a vein changed direction as it moved towards the edge, a torn section where something had fed, the darkening around a blemish, the tiny patches of lichen on the twig and the beginnings of next year’s buds.
Drawing asks something different of attention because the eye travels slowly and the hand follows, and somewhere between the two there is a kind of conversation in which we begin to notice not only what something looks like but how it is made, what has happened to it, what is changing and what remains. The finished drawing may be imperfect, but that is almost beside the point, because something has happened during the making that would not have happened if I had simply glanced, photographed and moved on.
Then the words begin to arrive, sometimes factual — oak, September, gathered after rain — and sometimes more difficult to categorise, small phrases or questions that seem to belong beside the image even though they explain nothing, perhaps because observation is rarely purely visual and the things we notice have a way of stirring memory, language and feeling at the same time. A leaf can become a colour study, a botanical note, a reminder of a particular walk, a record of the season, or simply the place where a thought happened to arrive.
This is one of the reasons I am increasingly drawn to bringing handwriting and calligraphy into my work, because a handwritten word records movement as well as meaning: the pressure of the pen, the hesitation before a letter, the rhythm of a line, the small variations that show that a particular hand passed across the page at a particular moment. When drawing and handwriting sit together, the page begins to feel less like an illustration and more like a record of attention, which is exactly what I want my nature journals to become.
The phrase gathered, drawn, written, kept has stayed with me because it seems to contain the whole process: gathered, because attention often begins with something small enough to hold in the hand; drawn, because looking changes when the hand is required to follow the eye; written, because some things arrive as words rather than images; kept, not because everything must be preserved forever, but because placing something on a page allows us to remain with it for a little longer.
This is becoming an important part of Moss & Maye too. Handmade journals, with a particular emphasis on nature journaling, will be coming to the shop soon, alongside prompts and guides designed to make it easier to begin, and I am also working on Christmas gift boxes that will bring some of these threads together — journals, paper goods, artwork, handwriting and small thoughtful objects gathered into something made to be opened slowly and kept.
The leaf itself will eventually become brittle and return to dust, as leaves do, but the act of looking has already changed it for me, because once we have attended closely to something it is never quite as ordinary again, and perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of drawing, writing and keeping — not that they stop things from passing, but that for a while they allow us to see more fully what is passing through our hands.
