The Green Planet

The Green Planet

Presented by Sir David Attenborough, The Green Planet takes viewers on a journey into the hidden world of plants, to experience it from their perspective and on their timescale.  The result is a revelation – plants are as aggressive, competitive and dramatic as animals, locked in desperate battles for food, for light, to reproduce and to scatter their young. Their solutions to the problems of living are often wondrous, beautiful and other-worldly. 

The series employs the latest filming technologies and showcases over two decades of new scientific discoveries about how plants behave and interact. The Green Planet reveals the strange and wonderful world of plants like never before. Across the series, David will travel across the globe, from the U.S. to Costa Rica, Croatia to northern Europe. From deserts to water worlds, from tropical forests to the frozen north, he finds new stories and brings a fresh understanding of how plants live their lives. He will meet the largest living things that have ever existed; trees that care for each other; plants that hunt animals and a plant with most vicious defences in the world. 

New motion-control robotics systems allow us to enter the world of plants, in real time and in timelapse, to watch as they grow and interact with the world around them. Thermal cameras, macro frame-stacking to give incredible depth-of-field, ultra-high-speed cameras and the latest developments in microscopy all allow us to reveal a fresh view of the lives of plants and their incredible beauty

Of course, plants don’t act alone. They forge intimate relationships, as friends and enemies, with other plants, animals and even with humans. They trick, deceive and use animals for their own ends. Contrary to how it may appear, when plants and animals interact, the plant is usually in charge.  

Each episode explores one ‘world’, and the extraordinary plants that live there: Tropical, Seasonal, Desert, Water and Human. Each is a uniquely challenging place to live and in each we see how plants have found a way to survive and thrive. In the first four episodes the challenges come from the natural environment. The fifth episode looks at the remarkable relationships between humans and plants, past, present and future.  

Filmed around the world, The Green Planet is an immersive portrayal of an unseen, inter-connected world, full of remarkable new behaviour, emotional stories, and surprising heroes.