Plants live secret, unseen lives. But they are as aggressive, competitive and dramatic as animals - locked in life-and-death struggles for food and light, taking part in fierce battles for territory, and desperately trying to reproduce and scatter their young. Using pioneering new filmmaking technology and the very latest science, The Green Planet reveals this strange and wonderful world of plants like never before.

Made by BBC Studios’ world-renowned Natural History Unit, the series sees Sir David travel across the globe, from the USA to Costa Rica, Croatia to northern Europe. From deserts to water worlds, from tropical forests to the frozen north, David finds brand new stories and gains 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 a plant with most vicious defences in the world.

Twenty-six years after The Private Life Of Plants aired on BBC One, we see how science and technologies have advanced, and how our understanding of the ways in which plants behave and interact has evolved. The series is also a great passion project for Sir David Attenborough - airing at a critical moment, just as our green world stands on the brink of collapse.

Pioneering motion-control robotics systems allow us to take a magical journey into the world of plants, in real time and in time-lapse, to watch their lives on their timescale and from their perspective. 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.

Plants don’t act alone; they forge intimate relationships, as friends and enemies, with other plants, animals and even with humans. The more we understand them the more we realise that they do things we previously thought of as ‘animal behaviour’. They count, they hunt, they deceive, they communicate, they protect their relatives and they manipulate animals for their own ends. Contrary to how it may appear, when plants and animals interact, the plant is usually in charge.

Filmed around the world, The Green Planet will be the first immersive portrayal of an unseen, interconnected world.

Tropical Worlds

More kinds of plants are crammed together in the tropical forests than anywhere else on earth. The result is beauty and intense competition - a plant battleground.

Most plants live high in the canopy. The upper branches of giant trees support magical sky gardens, where an almost infinite variety of flowers compete for the attention of hummingbirds and insects.

Plants need light, but the forest floor is dark. When an old tree falls, sunlight floods in, firing the starting gun on a race for the canopy. Seedlings battle with lassoes, grappling hooks and giant leaves, which cast others into the shade. In this episode Sir David Attenborough visits South America to see the Balsa Tree, which grows several metres a year, sacrificing strength for fast-growing, brittle wood.

Plants use leaves to capture light and carbon dioxide, which they turn into food. But leaves attract leaf-eaters. Their greatest foe is an underground fungus, which enlists an army of ants to march out, chop up leaves and bring them back to create a mulch which it feeds off. Plants retaliate by flooding their leaves with toxins.

When it comes to reproduction, the short-lived Balsa Tree outcompetes the rest, growing huge flowers brimming with super-strength nectar, irresistible to animal pollinators. The parasitic Corpse Flower is irresistible too - but only to flies. It mimics a dead animal, down to its teeth, hair and foul stench.

Tropical forests even create their own weather. Fungi release spores - tiny reproductive grains - a billion per square metre, which attract moisture as they float above the forest. The result? Most raindrops in a tropical forest have a fungal spore at their heart.

Today tropical forests are being chopped into ever smaller fragments, each a fragile reservoir of diversity. Yet there is hope. Left to its own devices tropical forest can recover. Grazing land left to regrow in Costa Rica has, in 20 years, become forest again, rejoining many fragments.