When we pause to observe the natural world more closely and record those observations and the way they make us feel, we gain a greater understanding of nature and ourselves. Writer Margaret Renkl, who has a new prompt journal out now as a companion to her best-selling book “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” joins me this week to discuss the benefits of a nature journal.
Margaret is a regular op-ed contributor to The New York Times, penning her thoughts and observations on “flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.” She was born in Alabama and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee, where for 10 years she was the editor of Chapter 16, a daily web publication of Humanities Tennessee that documents the literary life of Tennessee. Margaret’s other books include “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss,” and “Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South.”
Margaret Renkl is a New York Times op-ed contributor and the author of the best-seller “The Comfort of Crows.” (Photo Credit: Margaret Renkl)
Her new prompt journal is titled “Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal,” and it includes passages from “The Comfort of Crows” in addition to weekly writing prompts and blank pages to get creative juices flowing. It is a beautiful, illustrated, hardcover journal that will become a keepsake as the pages are filled in.
‘The Comfort of Crows’ and Reese Witherspoon
“The Comfort of Crows” was published last year in October and recently became a New York Times best-seller.
“It only took 11 months and the endorsement of a movie star,” Margaret says.
That movie star is Reese Witherspoon, who chose the book for her eponymous book club. Margaret and Reese got to know each other years ago because Margaret was Reese’s high school English teacher at Harpeth Hall School in Nashville. When they first met, Reese was a sophomore and shortly thereafter went off to Africa to film her second-ever movie. Margaret sent Reese class assignments via fax. Margaret was Reese’s English teacher again for her junior year, this time in person.
Reese texted her in early June this year. They had never texted before, and Margaret suspected it could have been an internet troll rather than the real Reese Witherspoon. So Margaret gave Reese a test: She asked Reese for the name of a male math teacher at Harpeth Hall in the late 1980s. Reese answered correctly, so Margaret knew she was genuine.
“I was just kind of flabbergasted,” Margaret says. “You don’t really expect a book like this to be a book club pick. You don’t expect it to be a New York Times best-seller. Nature books are usually quiet things, and this was a very boisterous, loud event in my life. And it’s been wonderful.”
Margaret has enjoyed hearing from readers who don’t think of themselves as people who love nature, who still came to realize the benefits of gardening and birdwatching to the world and to their own souls.
“That was what I really wanted to happen with the ‘Comfort of Crows,’ is for people to realize that our separation from the natural world is part of the reason that the natural world is so much in trouble right now, and also why we are so anxious and so worried and so sad,” Margaret says.
Tuning into our natural world is good for us, for everybody else and for our wild neighbors, she says.
“The Comfort of Crows” by Margaret Renkl is a collection of 52 essays that cover a year’s time.
“The Comfort of Crows” was Reese’s Book Club’s 100th pick, named in September of this year.
“As my high school English teacher (!!), Margaret had a profound impact on my life, making it incredibly special to have her as our 100th author,” Reese wrote.
How Margaret felt about being an English literature teacher is similar to how she feels about writing about the natural world.
“When you have a passion for something, it’s just natural to want to share it with others,” she says.
Nature writing awakens something for people. “Because we are creatures of the natural world. We move through the world in a mortal body, and we are hungry and we fall in love and we want to protect our young, and all those things are happening in the natural world.”
She shares one recent observation from her own life: “There’s a baby squirrel whose mother built a nest in our owl box right outside our bedroom window. The baby squirrel has gotten a little bit older, and every time his mother leaves for work, there he is — or she, I don’t know — with little bitty head just sticking out of the box watching, like, ‘When’s Mama coming back?’ And that is so like us. That is so like every human child. And I think when we see that kinship, when we see that connection that we have to the natural world, what we share with them, what they share with us, then something awakens that’s already there, that’s inborn and every single one of us.”
Baby squirrels in the owl house. (Photo Credit: Margaret Renkl)
The Origin and Purpose of ‘Leaf, Cloud, Crow’
Margaret credits her editor, Joey McGarvey, with plucking her first book, “Late Migrations,” out of the slush pile at Milkweed Editions and with having the idea for “Leaf, Cloud, Crow.”
“She took a job in New York, and I followed her because I trust her with my life,” Margaret says. “When you’ve been a writer, as long as I’ve been a writer — and I’m 62 years old — you know that there are some bad editors out there but there are a few really good ones and you stay as close as you can to the good ones. The editors who make you a better writer are the editors that you want to stay with.”
Joey was watching and listening to the response to “The Comfort of Crows” and saw that there was a place for “Leaf, Cloud, Crow.”
Every week in the book includes a passage from “The Comfort of Crows” and a writing prompt. The prompt could be about what you see outside your window, or what you see outside your front steps. Some are prompts to observe closely and some are to remember our childhoods, when we felt closer to the natural world.
“Which flowers bring up a homey feeling to you?” Margaret asks. “And why is that? What did your grandmother have growing close to the front door? What rose or what lily?”
There is also a blank page every week to sketch, paint, or create a graph.
!["The Comfort of Crows: Fall, Week 7 [Because I Can’t Stop Drinking in the Light]" is a collage (with cyanotypes, sketchbook page diagramming twilight, and a chromolithograph), watercolor, wax pencil, and ink on handmade paper by Margaret's husband, Billy Renkl.](https://joegardener.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Crow_F7_A4_600-708X466.jpg)
“The Comfort of Crows: Fall, Week 7 [Because I Can’t Stop Drinking in the Light]” is a collage (with cyanotypes, a sketchbook page diagramming twilight, and a chromolithograph), watercolor, wax pencil, and ink on handmade paper by Margaret’s brother, Billy Renkl. (Courtesy of Spiegel and Grau)
Heritage Plants
Margaret recalls moving into her house in suburban Nashville in 1995. It was a classic suburban neighborhood with boxwoods and nandina (heavenly bamboo) — and nothing else. Her mother, a passionate gardener who “had no care whatsoever for the natural world” believed there should be flowers everywhere.
Though Margaret and her mother differed on using pesticides like Sevin dust, they agreed on having flowers everywhere.
“When we lived in little bitty apartments, she always planted marigolds and zinnias. You were never so poor that you can’t plant marigolds because the seeds are easily harvested, easily stored, and easily passed along,” Margaret says. “And so she would bring up these irises and these daylilies … We have a rambling rose that has been passed down in our family since 1909. My great-grandfather bought it from a mail-order catalog the year that cultivar was introduced.”
That cultivar is called Dr. W. van Fleet. It is no longer commercially available but its sport (a genetic mutation that came from a Dr. W. van Fleet rose) is called New Dawn, and that is still available.
“My mother was not heeding my personal, strong belief that the plants should feed native wildlife,” Margaret says. “So we have a nice mixture in our yard of heirloom plants that go back in our family, and then plants that are native to middle Tennessee that I plant to feed the butterflies and to feed the bees.
“It’s a wonderful mixture of what matters to me as a human being and what matters to me as an ecologist,” Margaret says.
It doesn’t require a lot of money to have a flower garden. Zinnia seeds are cheap, and pollinators and seed-eating birds love zinnias. (Photo Credit: Margaret Renkl)
Break from the Internet
“One thing that I feel really strongly about with ‘Leaf, Cloud, Crow’ is that it’s different to have a writing prompt that you have to write in your own hand,” Margaret says. “You can then type it up and make it into a Word document or a Pages document or whatever, but there’s something that happens when we use our hand. It’s a kind of focus. We can’t click over to see if you know what’s happening on TikTok. We can’t click over and see if we’ve gotten an email from someone we are waiting to hear from. We have to do only that one thing. And doing only that one thing is something we have a really hard time with in the 21st century.”
Margaret keeps a stack of reporter’s notebooks that she can fit in her jeans pocket to take notes by hand and also records voice memos.
“Something has to catch my eye or my ear, or something has to attract my attention,” she says. “And then I realize, okay, something’s happening here.”
She turns that attention-seeker into a writing assignment and asks herself how can she figure out what’s going on, what does she need to look up, and what can she take a reasonable educated guess about?
Slowing down and taking a closer look at nature can reveal wonderful things.
(Photo Credit: Margaret Renkl)
Learning from Nature
“It’s a mistake to believe that nature exists to teach us things,” Margaret says. “That’s a very human-centric way of considering the natural world. Whether the natural world is a garden, whether the natural world is a yard, a city park, a window sill that a pigeon’s nesting on it — it’s a mistake. Those creatures and those plants are doing the things that they’ve been doing for ages. They don’t exist to teach us anything, but we are idiots if we aren’t learning from them. Because what they have to teach us is so important about what’s happening in the natural world and what’s happening in us.”
Ephemeral
In writing “The Comfort of Crows,” Margaret planned to catch some things that are observable in nature annually but briefly. For example, the spring ephemerals.
“They’re called spring ephemerals because they are designed by nature to take advantage of the sunlight and the warmth of early spring before the trees have leafed out and blocked the sunlight to the forest floor,” she explains. “If you have a yard that hasn’t been treated with insecticides or herbicides or pre-emergent poisons, you are gonna see those little wildflowers springing up — and you can’t see them from the car. They’re not daffodils. They’re little bitty things.”
For her writing, she went out looking and got up close to see the fleeting and tiny ephemerals.
Spring ephemerals are only in bloom for a short window. (Photo Credit: Margaret Renkl)
Another fleeting thing she looked for was rose-breasted grosbeaks, which only visit middle Tennessee very briefly before they head north to their nesting grounds.
I’ve seen just one grosbeak in the 14 years that I have lived north of Atlanta. Margaret advises that rather than putting out a tube feeder for birds, put out a tray feeder with safflower and a squirrel-proof baffle.
“They do better with a tray feeder,” she says. “They will come to a tube feeder, but they do better with the tray feeder because they’re so tired, and the tray feeder gives them a place to rest. They don’t have to cling to it.”
Tray feeder with the rose-breasted grosbeak on the left. A red-bellied woodpecker is on the right. (Photo Credit: Margaret Renkl)
Recognizing Changes and Making a Difference
Journaling one’s nature observations over time can help to recognize changes that are, sometimes, nothing to celebrate. Development and agriculture lead to habitat loss and bird and insect population decline.
Naturalist and forester Aldo Leopold recorded changes in Wisconsin in a series of essays in his landmark book “A Sand County Almanac” (1949). Henry David Thoreau wrote “Walden” (1854) about two years of living in natural surroundings.
“When you do it in your own yard, you also see changes over time,” Margaret says. “And some of those changes are disturbing. And they’re very, very upsetting when you realize that the flock of cedar waxwings that comes to your holly tree every year is getting smaller and smaller. There’s a real grief to that. But at the same time, keeping that grief in balance is very easy within the natural world, because every year baby birds are hatching out in nests in your yard because you have created a habitat that they find welcoming. So you can hold those two things — seemingly contrary things — in your hands much more easily than you can hold other contrary things in your hands because they’re right there before your eyes, and they’re audible to your ears.
“So I think that people might say, ‘I don’t want to know that there are fewer birds in my yard now than there were when I was a child.’ But what I say is that for everything that breaks your heart, there is another 10 things that lift your heart. And one of the great, glorious truths about the natural world is that nature abhors a vacuum. So when you make a space for it, it fills in, and we have so much evidence that it isn’t too late. We haven’t ruined everything. We can change. And that is one of my real deepest, most heartfelt hopes for every kind of writing I do — is that people will say, ‘It’s not too late. We have time to change.’”
She adds: “It is very empowering to know that you can make a difference.”
She says it’s easy to feel powerless, but people can come together and create collective will to exert political change.
“To say that ‘I’m not making a difference in my one little yard’ is to miss the point,” she says. “You can make a difference, and you can visibly see it. When you plant milkweed, you will see monarch butterflies laying eggs on those leaves. When you plant passion flower, you will see bees pollinating them, and you will see Gulf fritillary caterpillars laying eggs on them. It is visible to you. It happens instantly. And that is very self-reinforcing.
“So you start something very small, you plant a little plot of zinnias, and then suddenly the goldfinches are tearing the petals off to get to the seeds. And you’re going, oh, this is fun. And you want to do a little bit more next year. But at the same time, you’re awakening to your own power. You’re seeing that you aren’t powerless. And that’s a huge transformation that we are just, I believe, on the verge of making as a culture.”
A Gulf fritillary caterpillar on a passion flower vine. (Photo Credit: Margaret Renkl)
I hope you enjoyed learning about why and how to create a nature journal with Margaret Renkl. If you haven’t listened to the podcast yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Do you keep a nature journal? Let us know how in the comments below.
Links & Resources
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Episode 341: A Backyard Year, with Margaret Renkl
Episode 373: The Land Ethic: Aldo Leopold’s Conservation Philosophy
Master Home Composting: Learn how to turn your food scraps and yard waste into nutrient-rich compost in my Master Home Composting webinar presentation! Join me on Wednesday, October 23, at noon Eastern.
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
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“Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal” by Margaret Renkl
“The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year” by Margaret Renkl
“Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” by Margaret Renkl
“Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss” by Margaret Renkl
Margaret Renkl on Instagram: @margaret.renkl
Margaret Renkl on Twitter: @MargaretRenkl
Margaret Renkl New York Times op-eds
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Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Greenhouse Megastore, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
