Survival secrets of China's desert trees revealed on screens

A new BBC nature series opens with footage of trees growing in China's Taklimakan Desert because of the remarkable way plants have adapted to survive there, said one of the program makers.

The Green Planet is a BBC Studios Natural History Unit production for BBC and PBS, coproduced with The Open University, Bilibili and other international production partners. It will be available on CCTV-9 and Bilibili in China from Monday.

The series, which is fronted by David Attenborough, brings an unparalleled insight over five episodes into how plants behave starting from China.

"The Taklimakan was probably the most remote filming we did, and when I saw these orange poplar trees growing out of the sand, I thought 'this feels like something from another planet'," said Paul Williams, who produced the opening desert episode and also the one about tropical plants.

"They have very long roots, connected beneath the sand. So if one tree finds water, it can share it. A lot of the tropical episode is about how plants fight one another for survival－in the desert, it's about cooperation."

The series was shot over four years in 27 countries, with many local crews already being used before the pandemic intervened, restricting international travel.

Rosie Thomas, producer of the episode on changing seasons, said it is rare for plants to receive the treatment filmmakers usually give to wildlife.

'Star characters'

"Often, animals do take center stage, and the beauty of this series is that we were able to treat plants as star characters," she said. "Pretty much everything here is something people haven't seen before, or filmed in a new way, using new technology to show the plant characteristics."

Because of how plants change over the passage of time, each episode required about 50 separate shoots, which Williams said highlighted the difference between filming plants and animals.

"When you film a wildlife sequence, a lot of effort goes into finding the animal and waiting. But with plants, it's different," he said. "Plant behavior doesn't happen in a moment, it can take years. In the desert episode, we set up a time-lapse camera on an Arizona desert cactus and took tens of thousands of images over three years, which had to be edited."

Mike Gunton, the series' executive producer, said telling such a commonly overlooked story was one of the most exciting challenges he had faced in 35 years working in the sector.

"I thought we're missing a whole fundamental part of the natural world here," he said.

"We're all a bit plant-blind, so could we use the approach of immersing into their lives, could we translate (from filmmaking about animals) into the plant world, to tell a story about such an underexplored part of nature," he said.

"Scientists are now beginning to talk about plants in the same way they talk about animals. The challenge was how do you show that to people if you can't see it with the naked eye, so you have to use the camera to take you through the secret portal into their world."