Attenborough Offers Look At ‘Private Life Of Plants’

You may never look at a briary bramble in quite the same way after viewing Sir David Attenborough’s “The Private Life of Plants,” airing Monday and Tuesday on cable’s TBS.

Thanks to superb, virtually seamless time-lapse photography, the bramble’s ramble across the forest floor is enough to give you the creeps.

Attenborough bends and points out the little plant, then, suddenly, its pallid shoots whip about frenziedly, seeking to expand their dominion.

And then … zoop! A spiky tendril races off, relentlessly extending its barbed tentacle, insinuating, poking like, like, like … something out of “Aliens.” Eeeeeeeeuuuwww!

“I am so glad you enjoyed it,” beams television’s most ebullient naturalist. “To get the ‘frisson’ of it, you’ve got to go from real-time to time-lapse with no visible change.”

Somehow, he manages it. And thereby hangs a tale.

Attenborough told his time-lapse camera team, “We have to move in and out, extend time and condense time, and we have to have all the stylistic fluidity. …

“You’ll have zooms and tracks and pans and you’ll edit it all together just as you would any normal film.”

“They said, ‘Well, Dave, it’s all very well for you to sit there and say so. Any idea how we’d do that?”’

“No idea, old boy,” says Attenborough, mocking himself with a blithe, dithery voice. “It’s enTAHrely your problem.”

The ramble of the bramble was as carefully orchestrated as a symphony. Sir David points to the bramble, at rest beside a stone and a rotting tree branch. Freeze frame. The bramble is actually planted in a basin on the forest floor.

The light is measured, both for its intensity and direction. Up comes basin, branch, stone and bramble, all hauled 50 miles to a greenhouse shed, where a fake woodland floor, identical lighting and a computer-assisted camera await it.

“You entice the bramble to go a certain way,” Attenborough says. “You lay a track. You put a little carriage on the track with a motor and your camera on it.

“You calculate how fast the bramble grows - about 2 inches a day. You program that in, and you leave it - go to Borneo for three weeks!”

The entire sequence - less than 90 seconds - took a little more than three weeks to film.

That kind of care and attention are lovingly evident throughout the six hours of “The Private Life of Plants,” in which Sir David hops continents with aplomb, dashing from Borneo to above the Arctic Circle to dish the dirt on our reticent, photosynthetic friends.

Plants and humans, of course, exist on vastly different scales of time and dimension, so Attenborough uses every trick of photography, scale modeling and computer animation to render that other world in human scale.

Parts 1-3 air Monday beginning at 5:05 p.m.: “Branching Out,” how life begins from a single seed; “Putting Down Roots,” how sunlight, water and nutrients determine a plant’s size and structure; and “Birds & Bees,” the sexy chapter.

Yes, sexy. It’s not just the lush camera work or the voluptuous foldings and unfurlings of exotic blossoms. It’s the plants themselves that are fascinatingly sex-mad, filling the world with color, seed and scent.

Tuesday night’s episodes, which also begin at 5:05 p.m., are “Plant Politics,” the complex community of plant life; “Living Together,” symbiosis and interdependency; and “It’s a Jungle Out There,” how plants have colonized the earth’s most inhospitable places.

The six-episode run encores on Oct. 15, from 8:05 a.m. to 2:05 p.m., and at a more leisurely, two-an-afternoon clip Oct. 23-25, from 10:05 a.m. to 12:05 p.m.

The real treasure of “The Private Life of Plants,” though, is Sir David himself. A gifted writer endlessly fascinated with the world, Attenborough’s enthusiasm for the planet’s most diverse lifeforms is infectious.

Just don’t throw me in that briar patch!