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Sir David Attenborough Hosts “The Green Planet”

The five-part series uses the latest technology to reveal the secret, incredible world of plants

  • Christina Zeiders
Sir David Attenborough, Wiltshire, UK, explains how Water Crowfoot, Ranunculus aquitilis, has floppy underwater stems that flex with the current. But it sends special, stiff, flower-bearing stems up into theair to attract pollinators.

 BBC Studios

Sir David Attenborough, Wiltshire, UK, explains how Water Crowfoot, Ranunculus aquitilis, has floppy underwater stems that flex with the current. But it sends special, stiff, flower-bearing stems up into theair to attract pollinators.

The Green Planet, hosted by Sir David Attenborough, is a new five-part documentary series about Earth’s biodiversity told through the fascinating story of plants. As Attenborough explains: “Every mouthful of food that we eat, every lungful of air that we breathe, depends on plants.”

Produced in partnership with the BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit, The Green Planet premieres Wednesdays at 8pm starting July 6 through August 3. Watch it on WITF TV or the PBS Video app.

Each episode will be available to stream on-demand for free using the PBS Video app for four weeks after their television premieres.

A Green Planet airs Wednesdays at 8pm on WITF TV and the PBS Video app starting July 6 through August 3. Each of the five episodes can be streamed on-demand for free through the PBS Video app for four weeks after their television premieres.

Living secret, unseen lives, plants are often overlooked. Yet they’re as aggressive, competitive and dramatic as animals – locked in life-or-death struggles for food and light, battling for territory and desperately trying to reproduce and scatter their young.

Over the course of five episodes, Attenborough travels the globe – from deserts to rainforests and from mountains to the frozen north – to present 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, plants that hunt animals and plants that breed so quickly they could cover the planet in a matter of months.

BBC earth QUIZ | What sort of plant are you?

He finds time travelers in seeds that can outlive civilizations and plants that stay unchanged for decades. We learn that plants are surprisingly social – they communicate with each other, care for their young and help the weak and injured. They can plan, count and remember.

BBC Studios/Paul Williams

The flowers of the ‘7-hour flower’, Merinthopodium neuranthom, are pollinated by Underwood’s Long-tongued Bat (Hylonycteris underwoodi). La Selva, Costa Rica. The bat is the plant’s primary pollinator and the plant’s nectar is the bat’s main source of food.

BBC earth QUIZ | Which plant friend are you?

Attenborough believes we are living at the perfect time for a reexamination of the plant world. “There has been a revolution worldwide in attitudes towards the natural world in my lifetime — an awakening and an awareness of how important the natural world is to us all,” he said. “An awareness that we would starve without plants, we wouldn’t be able to breathe without plants. Yet people’s understanding about plants, except in a very kind of narrow way, has not kept up with that. I think this series will bring it home.”

By examining our relationship with plants – past, present and future – The Green Planet takes us on a journey that goes beyond the power of the human eye to reveal the stunning, hidden lives of plants. Thermal cameras, macro frame-stacking, ultra-high-speed cameras and the latest developments in microscopy reveal the lives of plants and their incredible beauty.

Watch The Green Planet through the PBS Video app or WITF TV Wednesdays at 8pm, July 6 through August 3. Episodes can be watched for free and on-demand using the PBS Video app for four weeks after their television premieres.

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