The Private Life of Plants (1995)

Directed by: Mike Salisbury | 292 minutes| documentary | Voice over: David Attenborough

Do plants have a private life? If you can believe the documentary ‘The Private Life of Plants’, yes. They reproduce, form alliances, sometimes pretend to be different than they are and kill each other. Often this happens so slowly and gradually that it escapes your view, but thanks to time-lapse photography (shooting images in slow motion and then playing them back quickly) a story full of drama unfolds. Forest giants are strangled by usurers and die a glorious death, only to serve as a breeding ground for a new generation. Triffid-like pitcher plants lure insects into their deadly trap. Wood anemones unfold their white glory in the morning sun. Desert plants provide an explosion of color after a rare rain shower.

‘The Private Life of Plants’ dates back to 1995, but can compete with more recent colleague documentaries such as ‘Blue Planet’ and ‘Planet Earth’. At the BBC they know how to portray nature. They also know how to color a dusty theme such as botany. Nature documentaries from the BBC include the humor and unique voice of David Attenborough, although the cinema versions (‘Deep Blue’, ‘Earth’) sometimes hire lesser narrators such as Michael Gambon and Patrick Stewart. Fortunately, ‘The Private Life of Plants’ has the correct voiceover. It has to be, because Attenborough presents the whole and personally travels the world to show the viewer all that beauty. In addition, the elderly naturalist is not afraid to climb trees or on the back of an elephant: hats off!

‘The Private Life of Plants’ gives an intimate glimpse into the plant kingdom and the images are breathtakingly beautiful, whether they were shot in Borneo or the English countryside. Ordinary things become special, such as the discoloration of deciduous trees or the proliferation of a blackberry bush. With a threatening music, the latter almost gets something sinister. Little assassins they are, those wriggling green brambles. Occasionally you get the impression that events have been manipulated. The scene in which a breeze swirls over a field of dead dandelions is beautiful, but probably a wind machine is working overtime off-screen. And would that fertility-enhancing steppe fire have arisen spontaneously? Let’s just say you sometimes have to lend nature a hand. That is also the theme of the documentary: nature is beautiful, but if we don’t handle it carefully, there will soon be little left of it.