7:30 tonight, should be damn good:
About The Program
Flowers are central to cultures all around the world and are deeply woven into our lives. Since flowers evolved, they have been the driving force of our life. In tonight’s second episode of How to Grow a Planet, Professor Iain Stewart discovers how flowers have transformed our planet.
He journeys to the remote islands of New Caledonia in the South Pacific to track down the earliest flowers and explains how the first flower, would have been pollinated by beetles in the absence of bees.
In the deserts of Africa he sees how flowers brought brilliant colour to its most barren landscapes and explains how flowers evolved a clever way to enhance their colour to attract passing insects.
But it wasn’t just life they were changing, flowering plants also helped to alter the very shape of the planet itself. Professor Stewart travels to Vietnam to explain how the emergence of vast tropical rainforests altered the landscape of the planet.
Eventually evolving to produce fruit, the source of food for primates, Professor Stewart explains how flowering plants drove the evolution of all animals even kick starting our own human story.