Sir David Attenborough's GREEN PLANET

Without trees and flowers, there is no life. The Green Planet, a new BBC series presented by Sir David Attenborough, takes us behind the branches and into the undergrowth.

- SIMON BARNES

IT BEGINS WITH LIGHT. Or perhaps I should say, it begins with David Attenborough. Life, and our endeavour to understand the way it works on this planet, is certainly the greatest of all subjects. And, for decades, it’s been taught to us by the greatest of all teachers.

Attenborough started to show and explain the nature of life on Earth in 1954 with the first Zoo Quest programme, and continues to do so to this day. His latest is a five-part series on the organisms that make every other kind of life possible. It’s called The Green Planet and it’s about plants. The most savage carnivore and the most committed of vegetarians equally owe their lives to plants.

And, once again, we have Attenborough to expound on these wonders. In this relatively brief and inevitably brilliant series, he not only supplies the commentary, in that voice, we know as well as our own, but he’s back doing what he does best: popping up all over the world to show and explain.

I have written the text for the book that accompanies the series and, as a result, I have lived with plants. I have lived with facts and ideas about plants, I have lived with images and words about plants. And by the end of it, I knew that I would never look at a plant in quite the same way again. Nor, I think, will anyone who watches these programmes, which see Attenborough, dressed in one of his loose-fitting, pale-blue shirts (how many of them does he own?) tell us more about the wonders he’s showing us.