Plants like animals, in order to survive, they need to compete for mates, invade new territories and struggle with one another. Yet, as David Attenborough points out, we are seldom aware of these dramas as plants live on different timescales to our own.
This episode - Travelling - opens up several routes plants take in order to travel through time and space in the form of seeds – how plants are able to move. The Private Life of Plants through visual techniques of speeding up plants lives into our timescale, allows us to observe plants three months lives in 23 seconds or speeding a week to a minute, enabling us to see how dramatic the lives of plants can be.
Ecballium elaterium, also called the squirting cucumber
Various strategies were observed of plant seed dispersal; using wind as means to transport seeds (bramble, bird cage), some plants produced seeds with fluff (cotton trees, dandelions), or with remarkable flying apparatus (sycamore seeds, liana) or jet propulsions (squirting cucumber, Himalayan balsam). Sourcing rain drops providing the fungi (mesembryanthemum seeds) to disperse seeds or using water, as a tool to provide them with the power they need for travelling (sea bean). The most common form of dispersing seeds is through living couriers enticing them through colour (burdock, grapple plant, blackberry) or smell (durian). Other seeds hitch hike a ride within the digestive tracks where animals carry these seeds over long distances. (Acacia seeds in African Elephant). Protea seeds are released by seasonal fires. The Magnolia seed flowered 2000 years later - an incomparable traveller in time.