by Thinus Ferreira
Twenty-five years after the BBC last in-depth look at the world of plants, the 5-episode series The Green Planet is coming to BBC Earth (DStv 184) from Sunday 13 February at 16:00 with Sir David Attenborough as the presenter.
In The Green Planet the BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit employs eye-popping time-lapse photography to enter the secret, unseen lives of plants across the globe.
“This is a wonderful opportunity to explore a neglected, yet truly remarkable part of the natural world,” says Sir David Attenborough. “Once again, the innovative approach of the BBC Natural History Unit and ground-breaking technology will reveal new and surprising wonders to audiences.”
He travelled from America and Costa Rica, to Croatia and northern Europe, to deserts and mountains, and from rainfoests to the frozen north to find new stories and a fresh understanding of how plants live their lives.
He meets the largest living things that have ever existed; trees that care for each other; and plants that breed so fast they could cover the planet in a matter of months and finds time-travellers – seeds that can outlive civilisations, and plants that remain unchanged for decades.
In-between he also examines humanity’s relationship with plants and how all animal life – humans included – is totally dependent on plants.
The BBC says The Green Planet – that also filmed in South Africa and that arrives a quarter of a century after the BBC’s The Private Life of Plants – will be “the first immersive portrayal of an unseen, inter-connected world, full of remarkable new
behaviour, emotional stories and surprising heroes in the plant world. This is
Planet Earth from the perspective of plants.”
Mike Gunton, executive producer, says The Green Planet “will take viewers into a world beyond their imagination – see things no eye has
ever seen. The world of plants is a mind-blowing parallel universe; one that we
can now bring to life using a whole range of exciting new camera technology.”
Using brand new technological advances and over two
decades of new discoveries, The Green Planet on BBC Earth will take viewers on a journey showing that plants “are as aggressive, competitive and dramatic as animals – locked in desperate battles for food, for light, to reproduce and to scatter
their young”.
Plants are social – they communicate with each other, they care for
their young, they help their weak and injured. They can plan, they can count, and they can remember.
The Green Planet makes use of new developments in robotics that move time-lapse, super-detail thermal cameras to watch plants’ lives on their timescale and from their perspective. Deep-focus, macro “frame-stacking” and ultra-high-speed cameras, along with the latest developments in microscopy travel beyond the power of the human eye and make visible the amazing, hidden life of the green planet.
The Green Planet‘s episodes include a look at “Tropical Worlds”, “Water Worlds” and “Seasonal Worlds” in the third episode that includes South Africa’s fynbos on Sunday 27 February.
The fourth episode is “Desert Worlds” on 6 March that includes stone plants and the desert starfish flower in South Africa’s Karoo and Zimbabwe’s Boabab trees, with “Human Worlds” as the 5th episode on 13 March.