Every year since 2021, Red Room Poetry has made the same offer to every school in the country: write a poem about the natural world, send it in, and a tree will be planted for it. Called POEM FOREST, the program is free, open to students from kindergarten to Year 12 and to their teachers, and it runs in partnership with Wollongong City Council and the Wollongong Botanic Garden, whose nursery raises the seedlings, eucalypts, paperbarks, flame trees, cabbage palms, wild quince and cheese trees, for planting on Dharawal and Wodi Wodi Country in the city's parks, streets, backyards and tiny forests. Almost 4,000 poems arrived last year, and the running total of poem trees now stands at more than 22,800. This year's theme is The Sounds of Country, an invitation to stop and listen before writing, and the judges include the Goori storyteller Dakota Feirer alongside poets Bastian Fox Phelan, Pascalle Burton and Amanda Anastasi. Poems can be up to twenty lines. Winners across ten categories, from lower primary to teachers, with places set aside for First Nations writers and for writers from other language backgrounds, receive publication, a judge's notes and a small prize, and the best Wollongong school wins a class excursion to the Botanic Garden with thirty plants to take home.

What the children make of it is the best part. A Year 6 boy from Windsor Gardens in South Australia put it this way in an earlier round: he did not care if he lost, he just cared about getting another tree in the world. Penny Hoswell, education officer at the Wollongong Botanic Garden, says trees share poems and stories all the time, it is just that not everyone knows how to read them. Last year's winners included a Year 3 writer from Wollongong Public School, a Year 5 poet from Stanwell Park writing in the First Nations category, and a teacher from St Scholastica's College, and in November the 2025 winners planted their trees together at Holborn Park in Berkeley. Dr Tamryn Bennett founded the program at Red Room, which is led today by chief executive Jonty Claypole, and the idea has never needed more explaining than this: a child listens to a place, writes it down, and the place gains a tree. Entries opened on Earth Day and close on Friday 25 September. If there is a young poet at your table, or a teacher in your family, there are twelve days left.

Our short take: from Red Room Poetry's POEM FOREST pages for the 2026 round, the 2025 winners page, and Wollongong City Council's announcement of the 2025 planting (18 November 2025). Story tip from Berwyn Lewis.