I Hear The Trees
Zaro Weil, illustrated by Junli Song
Welbeck Children’s Books

From her opening words, ‘when I walk/ wide-eyed/ through today/ yesterday is forgotten/ tomorrow faraway’ Zaro Weil asks readers to be in the moment and to immerse themselves in the natural world as they join her in this poetry extravaganza.

It’s impossible to do anything else in the opening poem, I Hear The Trees which involves engaging several senses – hearing ‘I hear the trees / gather in sunbeams’ , smelling ‘I smell the orange / crinkle of leaves\ and feeling ‘feel the brushes of tiny beasts burrowing inside swells of / rough bark.’ looking ‘ I watch autumn glow / through still warm trunks’.

A number of different feelings and emotions are evoked, from utterly joyful to sad; there’s humour aplenty and lots of alliteration and other word play. I can almost taste the Bamboozled Berries, those ‘bunches of bounteous berries / brimming bright balls’, which get gobbled up by birds.

Zaro writes about a wide variety of subjects from snakes to space, frogs to fungi and flowers as well as dinosaurs and a play wherein some cultivated flowers at Kew Gardens gang up on a Dandelion calling it a ‘good-for-nothing weed’ and Dandelion goes on to explain to them the benefits of having it in their community.

There’s sure to be something that will appeal to almost everyone herein and the author ends with a vital message, ‘hold tight to your world / for your world is my world / your planet my planet.’ – conservation in a nutshell.

With Junli Song’s print style illustrations throughout and some activity suggestions for educators, parents and children from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, this is a book for both class and home collections.