Woodland Nursery Wall Art: Two Alphabet Prints, Two Different Forests
Every woodland has its own alphabet.
If you've ever searched for a woodland alphabet print, you might have noticed something curious, some feature badgers and foxes, while others have beavers and bears. Here's the story behind mine.
The Badger Who Started It All
There's a badger who visits our garden from time to time. In the autumn he comes for the fallen pears from the tree at the bottom of the garden, and he's been doing it for years. Last year I set up a wildlife camera and caught him at it, ambling across the lawn in the dark, absolutely unbothered, eating pears.
He is the reason B is for Badger.
Another character on my alphabet is a kingfisher, if you know which stretch of the river and you're patient you may get to see one. A kingfisher is almost impossible to describe to someone who hasn't seen one. A flash of blue and orange, and it's gone. That's the whole description, really.
But a simple alphabet about 'the woods' presents a dilemma: whose woods?
Canada isn't just somewhere far away on a map to me. I lived in Calgary, Alberta for three years in my twenties, and my eldest son was born there. A wood in Canada has none of the Somerset creatures, it has beavers instead, and chipmunks, and grizzly bears, going about their business in a completely different landscape.
When I decided to draw a woodland alphabet, I had to choose which woodland. In the end, I drew both. So although the British woodland version is rooted in Somerset, the Forest Alphabet has a little bit of that Canadian chapter tucked inside it too.
Two Woodland Alphabet Prints , British Wildlife and Beyond
Sir David Attenborough has spent a lifetime enthralling generations with the natural world, not just the vast and spectacular, but the quiet, overlooked wildlife closer to home too. This alphabet does something similar, on a smaller scale.
B is for Badger. K is for Kingfisher, a flash of blue and orange above a Somerset river, gone before you've quite registered it.
J is for Juniper Shield Bug, which looks faintly like something from a jeweller's window if you get close enough. U is for Underwing Moth. Y is for Yellowwort. Z is for Zebra Spider.
Twenty-six British creatures, the ones that live in the woods and hedgerows and chalk grassland of these islands. Not the polar bear or the blue whale, but the wildlife that's genuinely out there in gardens, along riverbanks, under logs, and in the long grass at the edge of a field. The kind of thing worth putting on a child's wall and saying: all of this exists. Go and look for it.
The forest alphabet takes the same idea to a different landscape. G is for Grizzly Bear. J is for Jack Rabbit. K is for Katydid. Q is for Quail. The same attention to what's actually there, just in a different part of the world. It's designed for families who love nature wherever they find it.....whether that's Somerset, Banff, Seattle or somewhere in between.
Both versions share the letters I'm most pleased with. U is for Underwing Moth in both, one of the most striking British moths, almost entirely overlooked. Y is for Yellowwort, a small yellow wildflower that grows in chalk grassland that almost nobody knows by name. And Z gives you a Zebra Butterfly in one and a Zebra Spider in the other, because once you've committed to Z being something with stripes, the options open up nicely.
What Makes a Good Woodland Nursery Print
An alphabet print is a small declaration about what's worth knowing. Which creatures deserve a place on a child's wall, and which get left out.
I spent a long time on both lists. Some letters were easy — F has always been Fox, in both versions, because foxes are everywhere and I enjoy drawing them. O is Owl for the same reason. Even with the 'easy' choices, I ensure the detail is accurate to the species—the owl, for example, is a Barn Owl, and the deer is a Roe Deer.
But the harder letters K, J, U, X, Z those are where the real choices live. That's where a generic alphabet reaches for Kangaroo or Xylophone, and where I wanted to put something that might make a child ask a question they'd never thought of before.
What does a juniper shield bug look like? Why does the underwing moth have wings like that? What noise does a katydid make?
Not the alphabet. The questions underneath it.
How to Choose Between the Two
The honest answer is it depends on where you are and what you want the print to do.
If you're in the UK and you want something rooted in the specific wildlife of these islands, the badger, the kingfisher, the queen bee, the juniper shield bug then the British Woodland Alphabet is the one. It's the print I'd put on the wall of a child growing up in Britain, because it's about the world that's actually around them.
If you want something with a broader feel, if Bears are in your orbit & you're buying from overseas, or you just prefer raccoons to rabbits….. the Forest Alphabet is the one. It travels well.
Both are hand-illustrated by me in Somerset, and I print, pack, and post every single one from my studio here. Both can be personalised with a child's name, the title changes from My Woodland Alphabet to whatever you'd like.
And fundamentally, both are printed on archival 300gsm cotton rag paper with fade-resistant inks
If you're still not sure, feel free to drop me a message. I've looked at both of them enough times that I could probably help you decide in about thirty seconds.
— Carolyn
I'm currently illustrating a star map of the northern hemisphere sky — the constellations as they appear on a clear night, drawn with the same attention to what's actually there as everything else I make. If you'd like to know when it's ready, sign up below.
