“The biggest living thing that exists on this planet is a plant,” Sir David Attenborough says in his now familiar, hushed voice in the opening moments of the glorious — and wondrous — The Green Planet, and as grabbers go, the gentleman naturalist’s introduction to the giant sequoia tree in California is a portrait of awe in its own right.
Plants, Attenborough tells us, whether they are enormous, like this one, or microscopic, are the basis of all life, including ourselves. We depend upon them for every mouthful that we eat, “and every lungful of air that we breathe.”
The Green Planet, in which we see the lives of plants from the plants’ perspective, marks a high watermark in the pantheon of natural history programming of the kind Attenborough, now 90, has practically defined.
This five-part, five-week epic is a triumph in innovative camera technology but, more than that, it runs the entire range of emotions, from joy and wonder to fear and sadness — “a world that takes you by surprise,” Attenborough says, “and a view of planet Earth as never seen before.”
The Green Planet is a story of life and death, and what could easily have been a bore — cue the inevitable jokes about watching grass grow — is instead as thrilling as anything in Blue Planet or Planet Earth before it.
Tonight’s first hour, Tropical Worlds, marks an apt beginning because, as Attenborough shows us, the tropics are far from sedate and peaceful. More species of plants are crowded together in tropical rainforests than in any other ecosystem on planet Earth, and survival of the fittest means competition every bit as fierce and intense as anything seen on the Serengeti plain. The beauty is astonishing — and also deadly. Fast-growing vines choke off much-needed sunlight from trees many times their size, and yet photosynthesis and the delicate balance between predator and prey ensures that both will survive in the end, in one form or another, but only to a point.
Tropical Worlds is a study in symbiosis, a jungle home where a giant, subterranean fungus provides much-needed sustenance for leaf-cutting ants, which in turn trim the tropical rainforest of its unwanted vegetation. Life on Earth is a finely tuned balance between stillness and movement, as Charles Darwin found, but the bigger surprise here is how plants themselves are in constant motion — strike and counterstrike — despite seeming to be suspended in animation to the naked eye. Seedlings sprout in the tropical rainforest, in countless shades of green, closely followed by those voracious vines, seeking every drop of spare rainfall and every ray of filtered sunlight from the canopy above. There are balsa trees whose blossoms fill and refill six times in a single night, to attract the pollinators they need to survive, while the blood-coloured petals of the so-called “corpse flower,” rafflesia, three-feet across, have a scent so putrid it attracts carrion flies, where they are swallowed and devoured whole.
There are wonders here, too, from a bioluminescent fungus in the Congo, “chimpanzee fire,’ that glows in the dark as it releases billions of spores into the night air, and it’s hard not to appreciate the forces of nature at work, in ways every bit as compelling as seeing a blue whale give birth in the deep sea.
The Green Planet is nothing short of an astonishment. In all, the program took 10 years to make, but that’s not entirely true. There are moments here that were 500 million years in the making, and it shows.
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The Green Planet premieres Wednesday, July 6 on PBS at 8E/7C. Subsequent episodes air Wednesdays through Aug. 3