A corner of a shelf, a cloth that changes with the year, and whatever the children carried home in their pockets. That is the whole of it.
Many of our families keep a nature table at home, and new families often ask what one actually is. The honest answer is that it is much simpler than the phrase makes it sound, and it asks very little of you.
What it is
A nature table is a small surface set aside in your home that reflects the season outside your window. It changes as the year changes. That is its only rule.
It does not need to be a table. A windowsill, the top of a bookshelf, a tray on a chest of drawers — all of these work. What matters is that it is low enough for a child to see properly, and that it is somewhere the family passes regularly rather than a room nobody sits in.
How to begin
A cloth
Start with a piece of fabric in the color of the season. Green through spring, gold and warm through late summer, russet and brown through autumn, white or pale blue through the deep of winter. A plain cotton or a silk square is plenty. This one change does most of the work — children register the color shift long before they register anything placed on top of it.
Things gathered
Then add what you find. Acorns, a good stone, a pine cone, a feather, seed heads, the first daffodil, a handful of shells. The collecting is as much a part of it as the arranging, and it is better done on a walk than ordered from anywhere.
One thing that stays
Many families keep one steady object all year — a candle, a small wooden figure, a bowl. It gives the table a center, so that the seasonal things have something to gather around.
Letting the children arrange it
This is where most of us have to sit on our hands, and it is worth doing.
A nature table arranged by a four-year-old will not look like the ones in the books. Things will be crowded to one side. The good stone will be placed on top of the daffodil. Something inexplicable from the recycling will appear in the middle of it.
Leave it. The table is not decor, and it is not yours. Its purpose is to give a child somewhere to put the outside world when they bring it in, and a child who is corrected on the arrangement quickly stops bringing things at all.
If the table looks slightly wrong to an adult eye, it is probably working.
Through the year
- Early spring — bare twigs in a jar, the first bulbs, a green cloth, anything just beginning.
- Late spring and summer — flowers that will fade and be replaced, shells and stones from anywhere you traveled, a bright cloth.
- Autumn — seed heads, acorns and conkers, wheat, leaves turned; russet and gold underneath.
- Winter — evergreen, a candle lit in the afternoon, white or deep blue, and rather less on the table than at other times.
The emptying matters as much as the filling. Clearing a table at the end of a season, and putting the cloth away, tells a child something true about how the year moves — that things end, and that the ending is a normal part of it.
If you are starting this week. Take a cloth in whatever color the season suggests to you. Go for a walk with your children and bring back three things. Put them on the cloth. That is a nature table, and it is finished. You can add to it for the next ten years.
