All Episodes 2012

Take a glimpse behind the scenes at the tricks, technology and trouble that went into making Kingdom of Plants.

David begins his journey inside the magnificent Palm House, a unique global rain forest in London. He explores the extraordinary plants that are so well adapted to wet and humid environments and unravels the intimate relationships between wet zone plants and the animals that depend on them.

David begins with the secret world of plant movement and uses sinister carnivorous plants to show just how active plants can be. As the seasons change, David demonstrates how plants operate on a different time scale to us; how they modify their lives according to the time of year.

David discovers the plants that have evolved to shed their dependency on water enabling them to survive in the driest environments.

Kingdom of plants 3D was to be a series with plants as the heroes, and we needed to do them justice. Our production team at Atlantic embarked upon an exciting technological adventure, developing our own specialist camera kit to shoot 3D in extreme close-up. At Kew the loading bay of the tropical nursery was transformed into a bespoke macro studio, we developed new ways of filming 3D time-lapse, and we built whole new rigs to capture the tiniest details of plant and animal structures. All of this took meticulous planning and a herculean effort in logistics alone, but the hard work has been rewarded.