GREEN PLANET

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