2 Book Bundle
PRIVATE LIFE OF PLANTS
Without plants, there would be no food, no animals of any sort, no life on earth at all. Yet for most of the time their lives remain a secret to us, hidden, private events.
The reason is merely a difference of time. Plants live on a different time-scale from ours. Though not obviously to the naked eye, they are constantly on the move: developing, fighting, avoiding or exploiting predators or neighbours, struggling to find food, to increase their territo- ries, to reproduce themselves, to find and hold a place in the sun. We only need to learn to look.
In this book, and his BBC television series, David Attenborough does look. He examines in turn the great trials of plant life the world over:
1 Travelling
2 Growing
3 Flowering
4 The Social Struggle
5 Living Together
6 Surviving
David Attenborough shows us the natural world and how it works, with a clarity and infectious enthusiasm that few other writers or film-makers have matched. One of the most successful teachers of the late 20th century, his books and films are consistently of the highest quality. The Private Life of Plants is central to his work, the background to all that he has studied so far.
Given this fascinating new view of vegetable life, anything that grows on soil or rock or water, in open country or the smallest garden, suddenly seems quite different: less gentle altogether, in restless motion night and day, locked in the end- less competition necessary for survival.
"This is David Attenborough at his best... Full of delights and surprises, even for those who thought they knew about the seemingly passive green world around us."
PROFESSOR GRENVILLE LUCAS
Keeper of the Herbarium and Library Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
THE TRIALS OF LIFE
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH'S brilliant new book and BBC TV series follow Life on Earth and The Living Planet in surveying the whole animal kingdom mites and mammals, insects, fishes, birds and reptiles all over the world - but with a difference. Whereas the earlier books were about evolution and the variety and development of animals' bodies, this one is about the way they use those bodies: how animals behave and why.
Each chapter, like each TV programme of the same title, looks at a separate stage in the life of animals. In each, Sir David shows with dramatic and often moving examples how from birth to death all animals have to solve a particular set of problems if they are to survive and eventually pass their genes to the next generation. Life is indeed a series of trials:
1 Arriving
7 Living Together
2 Growing Up
8 Fighting
3 Finding Food
9 Friends and Rivals
4 Hunting and Escaping
10 Talking to Strangers
5 Finding the Way
11 Courting
6 Home-making
12 Continuing the Line
The crab with stinging boxing gloves, the mother bat finding her baby among 10 million others, the cleaner-fish whose customers queue up in the sea, the lion who kills the cubs of a rival, the navigating ant and the viper that is a caterpillar all behave as they do for the same ultimate reason.
The book ends a trilogy begun 11 years ago with Life on Earth, which Desmond Morris called "Quite simply the best introduction to natural history ever written", and Konrad Lorenz "An achievement of the artist's eye and the poet's pen." At the same time it is an admirably clear and attractive introduction to this youngest branch of the natural sciences.
David Attenborough wrote the text, and chose the colour photographs to illustrate it, at the same time as making the films. The book and programmes complement each other.
