A tree portrait is not a scientific paper and not a poem. It sits somewhere in the middle: one tree, watched closely, written down honestly. Done well, it is the most satisfying piece of nature writing a blogger can produce, because it belongs to you and to a particular patch of ground. It cannot be copied, scraped, or written by anyone else. Here is how to build one.

Why One Tree Is Better Than a Woodland

A whole wood is generous but slippery. Walk into a wood and you will notice the general before the particular: the light, the smell, the birdsong, the crowd of trunks. Try to write that and you end up with pleasant vagueness. A single tree gives you something to return to. It has a fixed place, a shape you can learn, a history you can guess at and partly verify. When you visit the same oak or lime or hawthorn twenty times across a year, you start to notice things no casual walker ever will: which branch the mistle thrush sings from in February, where the bark splits after a hard frost, when the first leaf actually unfurls rather than merely appears.

That accumulated noticing is the raw material of a portrait. Everything else is craft.

Choose Your Tree and Commit

Ideally, pick a tree you pass often — on the school run, on the way to the allotment, at the end of your own street, or in a corner of a local park. Proximity beats prestige. A slightly scruffy sycamore you see four times a week will yield far more than a famous specimen you visit twice a year.

There are a few practical things to weigh up:

• Access. Is it on public land or somewhere you have permission to linger? Do not make a nuisance of yourself on private ground.
• Safety and age. A mature tree with dead limbs is more interesting to write about, but keep your distance in high winds and never climb it.
• Distinctiveness. A tree with a story — a hollow trunk, a lightning scar, a boundary hedge grown into a full standard — gives you more to work with.
• Your own feeling for it. If you find it dull in March, you will find it dull in September too.

Once chosen, name it in your notes. "The ash by the canal bridge." Specificity keeps you honest.

Keep a Seasonal Notebook

Visit at least once a month, and if you can, once a fortnight in spring and autumn, when everything changes fastest. Take the same photograph from the same spot each time — it becomes your visual timeline. Write the date and the weather, always.

At each visit, note:

• Phenology. Buds swelling, breaking, leafing, flowering, fruiting, leaf fall. Give dates, not seasons.
• Colour and texture. Bark, lichen, moss, the underside of leaves, the shade of the new growth.
• Weather and light. What the rain has done to the trunk, how low sun catches the crown.
• Wildlife. Insects, birds, squirrels, fungi, galls, holes, nests, feeding signs.
• Human traces. Carved initials, litter, rope swings, a bench, a path worn bare.

Jot fragments rather than full sentences. "Wet bark nearly black, smells of earth and something sour. Three rooks. One branch down after Tuesday's gale." Those fragments will carry you later.

Gather the Facts That Earn Their Place

A portrait needs a skeleton of fact, but only the facts that illuminate. Look up your species and learn its habits: its typical height and lifespan, its leaf shape and arrangement, its flowering and seeding cycle, how it responds to coppicing or pollarding, what it is used for, and what lives on it.

Then find out about your tree specifically:

• Girth. Measure the trunk at about 1.5 metres from the ground. Record it in centimetres, and repeat each year.
• Setting. Old hedge line, parkland, former orchard, boundary marker, railway embankment, churchyard.
• Local history. Parish records, old maps, a neighbour who remembers it being smaller.
• Condition. Hollowing, deadwood, storm damage, disease, the shape of the crown.

Use one or two figures, not ten. "A girth of 340 centimetres suggests it was here before the houses" does more work than a table of measurements.

Layer In Memory and Quiet Reflection

This is the part that turns a record into writing. Facts sit on the page; memory gives them weight. Bring in whatever honestly connects: climbing a similar tree as a child, a grandparent who could name every bird, the year you moved to this street, a funeral, a first day at a new job, the smell of bonfires in October.

Reflection should be brief and unforced. One or two sentences near the end of the piece is usually enough — a thought about time, patience, or what it means to notice something slowly. Avoid grand claims about nature's wisdom. If you find yourself writing "the tree teaches us", cut it and write what you actually saw instead.

Shaping the Draft

A portrait of 700 to 1,200 words works well in four movements: arrival, description, history, and return. Open with a specific moment — a cold morning, a particular sound. Describe the tree as it stands now, using your notebook details. Move into what you have learned about its species and its place. Finish with something that has changed in you or in the tree.

Read it aloud. Cut every adjective you would not defend, and every sentence that explains the feeling rather than showing it. Keep the dates. Keep the measurements. Keep the one detail that surprised you — the beetle, the frost crack, the fact that the buds were sticky in March.

Then write the next entry. A portrait is never finished; it simply pauses between visits. The tree carries on without you, and that is precisely what makes it worth returning to.