8 January 2022 | New Scientist | 29Green and mighty
Plants are ferocious, intelligent and talkative – and now
we can listen in on all the drama, finds Elle HuntTV
The Green Planet
BBC One
January
HOUSEPLANTS are the new pets.
According to the US National
Gardening Association, sales rose
by nearly 50 per cent in the three
years up to 2019. Then, through
the pandemic, they rose even further
as we sought to bring nature indoors.
Yet as our homes become
greener than ever, plant growth
is in decline across the globe. The
latest documentary series from
the BBC seeks to join those dots
and spur us into action.
Presented by David
Attenborough, The Green Planet
reveals the secret lives of plants
in the same way The Blue Planet
opened our eyes to the oceans.
As a spectacle, it is a world away
from The Private Life of Plants,
the BBC’s last in-depth look at
plants from 25 years ago. It is
even a step up from last year’s
incredible A Perfect Planet.
Through advances in filming
techniques and scientific
understanding, The Green Planet
shows plants not only as we have
never seen them before, but as we
struggle to even imagine them:
locked in vicious competition for
resources, strategising to gain
the upper hand, helping each
other and even communicating.
The footage of these battles,
shot using time-lapse cameras to
put the viewer on “plant time”, is
surprisingly dramatic. A sequence
in episode one that focuses on
tropical rainforests captures the
race for sunlight fought from the
forest floor. A Monstera that is
making a dash for the canopy is
lassoed by a vine seeking to hitch
a ride, before both are overtaken
by a fast-growing balsa. Shot over
a year and distilled into just a few
minutes of screen time, it speaks to
both the ambition and the practical
challenges of the project.
As regular viewers of the BBC’s
natural history output will no doubt
expect, The Green Planet makes a
feature of these challenges and the
groundbreaking technology that
was employed to overcome them.
A computer-controlled robotic
camera, developed over a decade
by a US ex-military engineer in hisgarage and dubbed The Triffid, is
one example. When mounted on a
sliding ladder, it was able to capture
a multi-angle tree’s eye view of
leafcutter ants from 7000 different
points on the insects’ trail, tracking
them as they harvested leaves high
in the canopy and carried them deep
into their underground nest.
Getting a smooth shot was no
mean feat – one knock or a raindrop
on the lens would mean restarting
the whole process. The result is an
astonishing view of an ecosystem
in which fungus, ants and trees are
locked in a game of “strike and
counter-strike”, says Attenborough.
We see more of Attenborough
on location than we have in recent
documentaries and, as ever, he is
the perfect guide to this hidden
world, sharing the experience of
someone who has been to many
of these places before but is still
just as enthralled by them.
His enthusiasm is key to
making species such as the
carnivorous “corpse flower”
seem as charismatic as any
mammal, and the synchronised
descent of thousands of seedlings
in the dipterocarp forests of Borneo
as moving and urgent as a newly
hatched turtle’s sprint to the sea.
As is the way with nature
documentaries these days, there
is a serious message at the heart
of all of this. With few habitats on
Earth unmarked by human activity,
Attenborough points out that the
connections between species
of plants and animals, whether
competitive or collaborative,
“are now becoming increasingly
fragile”. In showing us the drama
and intrigue that is right under our
noses, the series urges us to not
only marvel at this strange new
world, but also to look after wild
plants just as carefully as our
pampered houseplants. ❚Elle Hunt is a writer based in Norfolk, UKWhen hornworm caterpillars eat
tobacco, the crop releases nicotine
that attracts hungry lizards
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