As a dedicated city person, I’m not nearly as nature-conversant as I’d like to be. I’ve spent much of my adult life walking past trees without giving them a second glance, barely noticing flowers, treating gardens as the abstractly attractive product of someone else’s labor. I’m not proud of this. And this year I’m making an effort to do something about it: My spring resolution is to get better at attending to the green world.

In fact, I’ve already begun, and have a few ideas, strategies, and tips to share — even if you’re a more advanced flora fan than I have been. Most important: Don’t wait for peak spring. Yes, it’s tempting to focus on the time of full-bloom tulips and crowd-attracting cherry blossoms. But the sooner you start, the more subtle and compelling the changes you’ll notice.

For me, the biggest challenge in making myself a better nature-noticer was trying to take it all in at once: Once I started paying attention, my green choices to attend to were overwhelming. I found an anchor by picking out a favorite tree — a beautiful willow. (I even gave it a name: Patsy, inspired by the mention of a willow in Patsy Cline’s song, “Walking After Midnight.”) You could choose one plant on a windowsill, one patch of weeds forcing its way through a sidewalk crack, whatever strikes you. 

Make this your anchor. Watch it over days and weeks and beyond. Spring is the perfect for this because change happens fast — a bare branch can be in full blossom within weeks. When you track one subject closely, you start to feel the rhythm of the season rather than just accepting it as scenery.

The green world isn’t all green. On neighborhood walks, really scrutinize the plants and trees you encounter and count the colors you notice. Even setting flowers aside, you’ll see varieties of browns, yellows, reds.

You don't have to become an amateur botanist, but knowing the name of a thing can transform your relationship to it. I got curious about the mix of lush green-and-rust leaves on a plant in a neighbor’s yard and used the iNaturalist Seek app (sort of a Shazam for plants) to identify it. I was embarrassingly excited to learn it is an Indian Hawthorn; now I check on it whenever I take the dog out. Learn a new plant name a week, or just set a goal to learn three this spring.

Spring is something you can hear (changing birdsong, the rustle of new leaves in the wind), smell (cut grass, a rain’s aftermath), and even touch (the waxy surface of a magnolia petal, the rough grain of bark). Try closing your eyes for 30 seconds on a park bench. What arrives?

If you feel a spring-observation rut coming on, try giving yourself a prompt. Just one per walk. What's the tallest living thing I can see right now? What's the smallest? Is anything here in the process of dying? What looks young and new? These prompts turn a walk from transit into mild investigation, which turns out to be considerably more interesting.

A note on your phone. A photo a day. A single line in a notebook: “The tree outside the office has little red buds now.” The act of recording forces a moment of genuine attention, and that’s the goal. Don’t worry about what will become of your record when spring is done. But maybe making that record will get you curious about how your green world will evolve in the summer and beyond.