July Nature Journaling: Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary
The Calendar Year may get paid commission for purchases made after clicking a link on this page. This website is for inspiration purposes only. The content provided is meant to spark creativity and ideas, not to serve as professional advice or as endorsement.
July is the month when nature journaling gets genuinely interesting in a different kind of way. Not because there’s less to see. There’s still plenty. But because the dramatic firsts of spring are behind us now. The migrants have arrived, nested, and are quietly getting on with things. The blossom is long gone. The dawn chorus has settled into something more subdued.
And so July asks something slightly different of you as a journaller. It asks you to find the extraordinary in what looks, on the surface, like ordinary high summer. To look more carefully at the things that are always there rather than chasing the seasonal highlights.
I’ve found this shift genuinely rewarding. There’s a particular kind of attention that July demands, a slower, more patient kind, that I think produces some of the richest journal entries of the year. You just have to resist the temptation to think that because the swallows have been here for a while now, they’re no longer worth writing about.
High Summer and What It Actually Looks Like
There’s a popular idea of summer as this uniformly green, warm, buzzing idyll. And July can be that. But it’s also more complicated and interesting than that image suggests.
By July, the fresh bright green of May has darkened and deepened. Hedgerows are thick and slightly dusty-looking. Verges are tall with umbellifers, those flat-topped white flowers like cow parsley and hogweed, going to seed. Grasses are flowering. The elder is in full flower and then moving quickly towards the berries. In many parts of the UK and northern Europe, the landscape has a slightly tired, overripe quality that’s actually very beautiful if you tune into it.
In much of North America, July is genuinely hot, and the landscape reflects that. Prairie wildflowers are peaking in the Midwest. In the southeast, the air is heavy and humid and alive with insects. In the Pacific Northwest, it’s often the driest month of the year. Pay attention to the specific quality of July where you are. Write about the heat, or the humidity, or the particular smell of dry grass in the sun.
These sensory details are what make journal entries come alive when you read them back later. The temperature. The feel of the air. The sounds of insects rather than birds. July has a very particular atmosphere and it’s worth trying to capture it.
The Secret World of Grasses
I want to make a case for grasses this month, because they are almost universally ignored, and they are absolutely fascinating once you start looking.
July is when most grasses are in or just past their flowering stage. Grasses flower in the same way as other plants. They have stamens, stigmas, and pollen. They’re just not showy about it because they’re wind-pollinated and don’t need to attract insects. But look closely at a flowering grass stem, and you’ll find something genuinely beautiful. The delicate hanging anthers, the feathery stigmas, the intricate structure of each spikelet.
There are around 150 native grass species in the UK, and learning to tell them apart is one of those slow, satisfying skills that repays years of effort. Meadow grasses, fescues, bents, brome, rye grass, quaking grass, with its trembling heart-shaped spikelets. In North America, there are even more species, and the prairie grasses in particular are magnificent.
For identification, Grasses of the British Isles from the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland is a good starting point for UK readers. The USDA Plants Database is comprehensive for North American species. And honestly, just picking one grass, learning its name, and drawing it carefully in your journal is a perfectly good July project in itself.
Butterflies: July Is Their Month
If June is good for butterflies, July is even better. In the UK, this is the month of the marbled white, the dark green fritillary, the silver-washed fritillary, the purple hairstreak high in the oak canopy, and the ringlet in damp grassland. Later in the month, peacocks, red admirals, and painted ladies start appearing in gardens as they move towards the ivy and buddleia.
In North America, monarchs begin their southward migration by late July in some northern regions, one of the continent’s great natural spectacles. The Monarch Watch project runs tagging programmes and citizen science recording that you can get involved with. The Journey North website tracks monarch migration in real time and is brilliant for following the story across the season.
For UK butterfly identification and recording, the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme is worth knowing about. Their Big Butterfly Count runs every summer, usually from mid-July to mid-August, and it’s a great way to contribute your observations to something meaningful. In the US, the North American Butterfly Association runs similar counts.
Try sitting still near a patch of flowers for half an hour this month and just watching butterflies. Note every species. Note their behaviour. Are they nectaring, basking, chasing each other? Behaviour is as interesting as identification, and it’s something your journal can capture in a way that a simple species list can’t.
Looking Down: The World Beneath Your Feet
July is a good month to redirect your gaze downwards. Not just at flowers and grasses, but at the soil and the life in it. Lift a stone or a log carefully and look at what’s underneath. Ants farm aphids on a plant stem. Beetles under bark. Earthworms in damp soil. Millipedes curled in a crevice.
This close-up world is endlessly rewarding, and you don’t need to go anywhere special to find it. A garden, a park, a roadside verge. Anywhere with a bit of undisturbed ground or some old wood will do.
A hand lens, sometimes called a loupe, transforms this kind of observation. A 10x magnification lens costs very little and reveals details you simply can’t see with the naked eye. The texture of a beetle’s wing case. The hairs on a bumblebee’s leg. The structure of a tiny wildflower. If you don’t have one yet, July is the month to get one.
For identifying what you find, iNaturalist remains brilliant. You can photograph almost anything, submit it, and the community and AI identification tools will usually tell you what it is within hours. It’s genuinely one of the best tools available for curious amateur naturalists anywhere in the world.
The Long Light of July Evenings
One of the great gifts of July is the evening light. In the UK and northern parts of North America, it stays light until nine or ten o’clock. The quality of that late evening light, warm and golden and low-angled, is one of the most beautiful things the year offers.
Go outside in the hour before sunset this month. Not for a walk, necessarily. Just to sit somewhere and watch the light change. Watch how it catches the grass. How it makes everything glow from the side rather than from above. Watch the swallows and swifts feeding in the warm updrafts. Watch the bats emerge as the light finally fades.
Evening is also when moths begin to fly, and when many wildflowers release their strongest scent. Honeysuckle, in particular, saves its best perfume for the evening, when the hawkmoths that pollinate it are most active. Finding a honeysuckle hedge at dusk and just standing and breathing is one of July’s underrated pleasures.
Try a series of journal entries written at different times of day this month. Early morning, midday, late afternoon, and evening. The same patch, observed at different hours, is almost like four different places. Notice how the light, the sounds, the activity, and the atmosphere all shift across the day.
July Journalling Prompts
One prompt, properly explored, is worth more than six rushed ones.
- Find a grass in flower and draw it as carefully as you can. Label what you can identify. Look up its name if you don’t know it. Write a short description of where you found it and what was growing nearby.
- Sit near a patch of flowers for thirty minutes and record every butterfly species you see. Note what they’re doing, not just what they are.
- Lift a stone, a piece of bark, or an old log and look carefully at what’s underneath. Describe everything you find. Then replace it carefully.
- Go outside at the same spot three times in one day: morning, afternoon, and evening. Write a short entry each time. Compare the three.
- Write a description of July heat, or July light, or the smell of dry grass. Try to capture something specific about the atmosphere of this month where you live.
- Find something you’ve walked past dozens of times without really looking at it. A particular tree, a patch of wasteland, a roadside hedge. Spend fifteen minutes really looking at it for the first time. Write what you find.
On Ordinary Days
I want to end with something I’ve been thinking about throughout this series. Most of our days in nature are ordinary ones. We’re not watching a murmuration of starlings or a basking shark. We’re walking the same route we always walk, seeing the same trees, the same hedgerow, the same patch of waste ground.
And yet those ordinary days, attended to properly, are where the real richness is. Because it’s the ordinary days that accumulate into knowledge. Into familiarity. Into the deep understanding of a place that only comes from returning to it, again and again, across the changing year.
July is a month of ordinary days, mostly. Warm, green, buzzing, beautiful in a quiet way. Your journal is the place to honour that. To say: this particular Tuesday in July, I sat in the garden and watched a marbled white butterfly on a knapweed flower for ten minutes, and it was enough.
It really is enough.
Next month: August, the beginning of the end of summer, and why the nature journaler’s year gets fascinating all over again.
Useful links mentioned in this post:
