"This bizarre world, with its many hairs, is in appearance very similar to a forest of baobabs." "Pores seem to open like hungry little mouths." "As strange as it may seem, this invisible nature is quite familiar to you." "This is the surface of a leaf, magnified hundreds of times using the latest developments in electron microscopy." "A technical feat achieved for the first time." "Here, sap progresses in the veins of a leaf." "An ejection of seeds is slowed down 2000 times," "because plants are anything but motionless." "Plants have conquered all environments, volcanic lands, dry deserts, estuaries," "ice and snow, and even the asphalt of our cities." "Deprived of legs, they have invented various forms of sexuality in order to conquer the world." "Their strategies have enabled them to take root in the most extreme places on the planet." "This is probably what our world looked like 460 million years ago, when the first land plants appeared." "A land covered with pools of acid hot springs, with temperatures rising to 90 degrees Celsius." "Despite such heat, some plants can grow." "Around almost every hot spring, you'll find grasses of varying types growing up against the hot water." "The high temperature water cools off very rapidly such that these plants can grow in these environments." "But there are some plants that are very, very interesting." "One known as its scientific name is Dichanthelium, but its more generic name is Hot Springs Panic Grass." "Looks like weeds in my front yard, but it's this grass right there with the purple edges to the grass leaves." "This particular plant has a fungus growing associated with its roots, and researchers at Montana State University have shown that this fungus relationship with this plant is what allows this plant to grow at these higher temperatures and tolerate high temperatures." "The mechanism is not yet known, but somehow, this fungus is imparting some protective measure or causing the plant to react some way that allows it to protect itself from these higher temperatures." "Next to the acid hot springs, plant roots grow on the surface to optimize the capture of oxygen." "They have also developed the capacity to withstand the heavy metals present in these hostile environments." "Plants get their energy from the sun." "Scientists call this photosynthesis." "Algae are the first plants that appeared at the beginning of life on Earth." "Unable to leave their aquatic environment, they are already masters of photosynthesis." "When the temperature drops, algae produce colored substances and sugars that act as an antifreeze." "Some algae will even accept to be swallowed by gelatinous organisms, whose envelope will protect them from extreme cold." "During the brief summer season of Spitsbergen, an archipelago near Greenland, the sun never sets." "It shines 24 hours a day, an ideal season to study the growing vegetation." "The Earth's crust will thaw in summer but remains low in minerals." "This severely limits the rate of growth and density of the vegetation." "Wherever there's a form of shelter, where seeds accumulate, where sediments accumulate, we immediately have vegetation that settles in." "Here's a typical and pretty area of Drias that is growing." "The plants, once rooted, will try to gain ground." "We can see it here, for example." "So basically, the goal is to hang on, then gain inches, bit by bit." "Just how do these plants colonize such cold, bare lands?" "To succeed, they group together, which enables them to store what little heat is available, an efficient way of conquering the surroundings." "Some of the plants that live here are over 100 years old." "There are two explanations for this." "The first is being able to resist the wind and cold temperatures." "And they do this by growing in clusters." "The second is the plants' compost." "Plants that die leave their own fertilizer, their own organic matter, for those who come after." "The generations of plants that die on this spot here form fresh Earth on the surface." "The grouping of plants serves as a breeding ground for other plants, such as the hairy lousewort." "The plant is well acclimatized." "It produces a hairy, feathery lining to protect it against the cold." "The lining is so tight, it acts as insulation and plays an important role in the screening of harmful sun rays." "The edelweiss uses the same technique." "Its flowers are protected by a duvet, a strategy used by many plants to avoid being naked in the cold." "This technique is also used to protect plants from heat, like this cactus." "Microscopic hairs allow plants to retain water necessary for their survival." "Some of them are shaped like anchors for catching droplets." "Each form of hair is perfectly adapted to a particular environment." "The most developed and most dense vegetation is located in an even more extreme environment, steep, sharp cliffs." "Oh, look over there." "Can you see?" "Between the zones of scree, where rocks have fallen, at the foot of the pillars there." "You have an area covered in green." "Let's go and take a look." "We're going over to the steep area." "We don't really know what type of terrain we'll meet, probably very unstable." "There are zones of really high erosion." "It's a very steep slope there." "It's very unstable." "To study biodiversity, you really need to reach the ecosystem, and some are not easy to get to." "But that can also be the reward, taking risks to get to places that nobody has observed." "This whole area is an extreme within an extreme." "Well, this is unexpected, very unexpected." "Here we have plants that are in fruit, or even in flower." "How do these plants find organic matter in such an inhospitable environment?" "Finding plants at a more developed stage here, hanging on a cliff at 100 meters of altitude, is really surprising." "At the same time, it's not a mystery." "We're just below a bird colony, so basically their food falls from the sky." "Here we have guano that brings nitrogen, the nutrient material which also allows a whole host of bacteria, plants, mosses and lichens to colonize this environment." "Lichens are a combination of algae and fungi that fragment in order to multiply." "It may take them 50 years to cover one square centimeter." "Within the lichen, the fungus filaments capture water and minerals and provide protection for the algae." "The algae captures light for photosynthesis and brings energy to the fungus." "Symbiosis is their force." "Other plants have invented more radical solutions in order to survive in nutrient poor environments." "Venus Flytraps naturally live on the border of North and South Carolina in the Southeast part of the United States." "This is the only place in the world that they are naturally found." "It's an area of about 20 square miles or about 40 square kilometers." "Why aren't all plants carnivorous?" "The answer is both simple and complicated." "On the simple side, first off, really we can say that all plants really are carnivorous, because all plants get minerals and nutrients through their roots." "And those minerals and nutrients are basically made up of dead animals that have rotted and decomposed in the soil, and the plants are sucking those up." "But the kinds of carnivorous plants that we see where the leaves have actually changed shape to make traps, this is very different." "And this is an accident of evolution that probably happened about 50 million years ago." "It actually happened about six times among the entire plant kingdom." "And some plants, those plants growing in very nutrient poor conditions, evolved a particular mutation to allow them to capture insects and extract the minerals and nutrients directly from the insects." "How do these plants catch insects?" "How do they move so fast without having muscles and nerves?" "The Venus Flytrap is taking the energy that's stored in water, pumping it out very quickly to close the trap and then re-pumping that water back in to reset the trap." "It's at the hinge of the trap that cells fill with water, causing the closure of the lobes." "These tiny hairs trigger the trap." "When prey successfully touches two sensory hairs within 20 seconds, it activates the death trap that immediately closes." "For the plant, the advantage is obvious." "A small twig will not action the trap for nothing." "Only the agitation of an insect is likely to trigger a second hair." "The sensitivity of the hairs is so finely adjusted that the fall of raindrops will not trigger the trap." "How does the plant manage to each such large prey?" "Carnivorous plants are not only mouths, but also stomachs." "They use these multiple red enzymes to reduce their prey to a pulp." "The plant secretes enzymes, just like people have digestive enzymes in their stomachs that dissolve the insect." "And then the plant just absorbs all the nutrients in the juices that were left from the dissolved insect." "Carnivorous plants only digest the soft flesh of their prey." "All that remains is the insect's exoskeleton." "It takes a Venus flytrap about three to five days to completely digest an ant or a fly that it has caught." "The Venus flytrap will only dine three or four times in its life before turning black and wilting." "Most carnivorous plants live in swamps, happily obliging Aaron Ellison to use his homemade kayak to approach them." "Sundews, or plants a lot like sundews, are probably the most primative or ancient type of carnivorous plant." "This sort of pattern of a sticky trap, then a more complicated trap having evolved has occurred at least five or six times in all of the plant kingdom." "Sundews are the primitive group, followed next in their evolutionary sequence by the Asian pitcher plants, and followed next in the evolutionary sequence by Venus flytraps." "It may be primitive, but this glue trap is highly efficient." "Each ball glows in the sun like a dewdrop and acts as a magnet to attract insects." "It contains a powerful sticky glue." "Any insect that lands is stuck with no chance of escape." "The efforts of this fly to escape its trap are in vain." "Once immobilized, it will be dissolved by round enzymes along the stem." "Pitcher plants are considered advanced as carnivorous plants go, because they have a variety of methods that they use to both attract and trap and digest insects." "The pitcher plant has these hairs that point downward so that when the insect tries to crawl back up, it gets caught in these hairs and falls further into the plant." "The inside of the pitcher is coated with a very, very fine wax that allows the pitcher plants to act like a sliding board for the insects to slide down into the very bottom where they're captured and digested." "The electron microscope reveals this amazing forest of hair, all pointing in the same direction, stopping any prey from climbing out." "Other species have replaced hairs by small tiles, in which insects' legs become trapped." "Some hairs are even equipped with glue on their tip." "Carnivorous plants have evolved to adapt according to varying sizes and types of prey." "There are over 500 varieties of carnivorous plants that live in swamps." "But some are not where you'd expect them to be." "Faster than a Venus flytrap, more powerful than the best mousetrap, it's the bladderwort." "And if you pull it up, it looks just like any other green, limp algae that you would find in the pond anywhere." "But put this under a microscope, and a whole new world of plant life will become visible." "These carnivorous plants capture zooplankton using a bag-shaped trap." "Equipped with a valve that closes at a speed of 10 to 15 milliseconds." "But unlike above surface carnivores, they do not have digestive glands." "How do they digest living prey?" "Bladderworts have made a pact with smaller than them, tiny protazoas." "It doesn't take long for an army of them to decompose the prey." "The bladderwort enables the protozoa to feed on large prey that they would be unable to catch alone." "And the protozoa break down essential digestive nutrients for the bladderwort." "It's microscopic symbiosis." "Once fed, the plant can now grow this magnificent flower." "Plants use energy to build structures." "Just like people invest money in businesses, plants invest carbon in structures." "We expected that a complicated structure like a carnivorous plant trap, like the trap of a Venus flytrap, would take a lot of carbon to build." "To our surprise, the results of our research showed that for a normal leaf that takes about a gram and a half of carbon to make every gram of leaf." "In contrast, these very elaborate, very complicated carnivorous traps that we had assumed, we had always assumed were very expensive to produce, turn out to be really cheap." "On about average, 20 to 25% less expensive, less energetically costly to make than are the leaves of a normal plant." "If people were designing a Venus flytrap, they would come up with a system of pumps and pulleys and engines that would require a lot of fossil fuels to drive that, as opposed to thinking about how they could just simply take the energy stored in water," "squeeze that energy out, and then reuse that energy again from the water to reset the trap." "And so plants like Venus flytraps have a lot to teach us." "We see a lot of really large carnivorous plants in science fiction movies." "But carnivorous plants really couldn't grow that big." "Oy, what I did?" "All the big plants, the things like trees, have lots of support structures, bark, wood, trunks." "Carnivorous plants are herbs." "They don't make wood, so a really, really large carnivorous plant would have so large an energetic demand simply to hold itself up that there wouldn't be enough left for the traps." "If some carnivorous plants have turned their leaves into insect traps, others simply capture water, another way of adapting to the surrounding environment." "Tillandsia grows mainly in treetops and lives on raindrops, the secret of its survival." "Water is trapped in tiny cups, which line the walls of the plant." "They act like buckets." "This rootless plant can absorb and retain water required for growth." "Splashing from leaf to leaf, the water droplets deliver rare minerals the plant needs for growth." "Unlike Tillandsia, the hypersensitive leaves of mimosa pudica will close to protect against weather or herbivorous predators." "A single drop of water can trigger this movement." "The closure is caused by little red balls that inflate like tiny airbags when the leaf feels a contact." "Plant leaves are covered with a network of veins." "They have as many different ramification patterns as there are fingerprints in humans." "Eleni Katifori is a leaf specialist." "What we want to understand is whether the environment or the particular conditions have an effect on the architecture of the venation, because we see a variety of plants in the desert or in the Arctic, or in wet or dry conditions," "and we see a variety of architectures." "We want to understand if there is any correlation between the environment, where the plant lives and the architecture of the venation." "This tree, in the heart of" "New York's Central Park, is a ginkgo." "It is amongst the oldest species on Earth." "In revolutionary ancient times, most plants were like ginkgo, very primitive." "Today, most of the plants you're going to see have very complex venation, very sophisticated." "And the reason for this is that ginkgos, which used to cover a very big part of the planet," "were out competed by the more sophisticated plants that can do photosynthesis more efficiently." "To study the evolution of its veins," "Eleni damages the ginkgo leaf by piercing a hole in its center." "Using ultraviolet light and optical filters," "Eleni has developed a method." "This liquid is a marker, and by absorbing it, the leaf will gradually reveal its structure." "Ginkgo has a very primitive vein network." "It has no loops." "When we create an injury, when we punch a hole, the water cannot bypass the injury site, and that part of the leaf will die." "Modern plants have evolved loops." "And with the help of loops, water can bypass any injury site and eventually fill up the whole leaf." "And this is the secret for survival for modern plants when there is damage." "This modern network of veins enables plants to adapt to all conditions with very low energy expenditure." "Leaves and leaf venation might still be evolving." "We don't know." "Plants are still competing with each other, and maybe in hundreds of millions of years they will have different and maybe more efficient patterns of leaf veins." "The bodies of plants have evolved through evolution." "Without legs, they have succeeded in colonizing all environments through inventive sexuality." "Plants have three ways of reproducing, sexless by auto producing young plants, self-fertilization, by sex between their own male and female organs, remote sex, with pollen, an extraordinary invention that enables them to reproduce without ever" "meeting a companion." "The sperm is protected within a simple capsule that will enable them to travel from flower to flower with the help of an insect, a bird or a mammal pollinator." "If you cannot deliver your own pollen, you have no choice but to trust it to someone else." "The plant provides nectar as a reward." "Pollen grains are quite diverse to an extent that you can recognize species based on the morphology of the pollen grain, very much like the fingerprints for human beings." "So, if you talk about 250,000 species of plants, there are that many, or almost that many number of pollen shapes, if you will." "And these maybe can be quite diverse." "It's one of the great mysteries of plant biology, why they are so diverse." "Some possible explanations would be, in fact, adaptation to slightly different conditions." "There's an initial prototype or initial pollen grain morphology that has evolved, and these has then diversified." "Under extreme conditions, pollen can survive several days." "It has the power to retain its water content." "But just how do they achieve this?" "Doctor Jacques Dumais has found an explanation by observing the structure of pollen with a scanning electron microscope." "Pollen is an amazing structure." "It's a small structure that could dehydrate extremely fast when it's released." "And it's in fact quite a feat, given their size." "Most small cells would shrivel and dry out within minutes under most conditions." "And what it does to protect itself, it folds on itself, just like origami, and becomes sealed and therefore can travel a great distance without losing water." "Jacques Dumais continues his investigation of ferns in the large greenhouses located on the rooftops of Harvard Forest, an offshoot of the famous Harvard University." "He is particularly interested in sporangia, the reproductive organs of the fern." "Using a high speed camera to film sporangia, at 2000 frames per second, he has discovered their technique of ejection." "The catapult system is really a great inspiration." "In fact, was evolved millions of years before humans ever thought of the catapult." "It evolved in these ferns to release their spores and make sure that they can be dispersed over great distances." "Relying solely on inside forces, this is also the case of the geranium, which expulses its seeds over more than one meter, or wild cucumber, which holds the seed throwing world record, at almost ten meters." "To optimize seedlings' chances for survival, seeds need to move away from the parent plant." "Too close, and competition for light and water could make life difficult for them." "Agrimonia and burdock thistles have invented velcro to hike a lift on the back of passing animals." "Under the eye of the electron microscope, we can see that each burdock spike has a hook, a hook that enables the seed to cling on to the fur of the animal." "Velcro copies this idea with two bands that grip to each other." "One side covered with tiny hooks, the other with small loops." "The seed of erodium has a beak and a tail." "It will screw into the ground through the movement of its tail, that wraps or unwraps according to humidity levels." "Drilling mechanisms were invented by plants a long time ago." "There's quite a diversity of mechanisms that are out there that some of them have been rediscovered by humans." "Some of them have yet to be rediscovered." "The dandelion is using a strategy that guarantees almost certain dispersal." "If you're relying on animals to come by, or things like that, you're somewhat dependent on your environment." "Wind is by and large always present, at least in some amount, and can bring you to great distances if it's strong enough." "To colonize the world like the dandelion, most seeds choose wind, where they use different tricks like a parachute or helicopter blades." "This truly is bioengineering." "By dispersing in millions, seeds in pollen can accomplish vast distances." "To grow and conquer, they must find new and suitable environments, including our cities." "They are so good at traveling, that 55% of all species found in the Northeast of the USA are present in the heart of New York." "60% of the entire flora of Great Britain is found in London." "With their ability to infiltrate cracks and their resistance to aggressions, plants are colonizing our cities." "Certain invasive plants can come from far, far away." "Invasive plants do not only rely on wind to travel." "With the explosion of globalization, they now take airplanes and boats to reach the continents they would not ordinarily be able to reach." "The Chinese tree of heaven and the Japanese knotweed have invaded our cities." "Professor Florence Piola focuses on the strategies of knotweed to crowd out native plants." "Knotweeds have an extremely rigorous rhizome that grows very fast, several meters a year." "And a small fragment of rhizome can relocate a short distance away, giving a new individual plant." "Knotweeds are also masters of chemical warfare." "They secrete molecules in the soil that poison other plants." "Weakened by toxins, the native plants do not grow as fast as they usually would, and the invasive plant proliferates." "In Europe, the Japanese knotweed plants arrive with a chemical cocktail that European plants ignore." "Whereas in Japan, plants that live close to knotweeds have had time to adapt to this chemical cocktail and get on well." "Knotweeds proliferate more in our cities than in their native environment, as they have no natural enemies." "And they have even allied with other invaders." "The knotweed has a special relationship with invasive ants that are not originally from Europe." "We have found these ants drinking the nectar secreted by the stems, and we believe that the ants, in turn, keep the knotweed free of pests." "The knotweed is not the only undesirable invasive plant." "The list of concrete conquerors is long." "Turkestan goosefoot, South African senison," "Chinese tree of heaven, etc." "Some of them become giants, as is the case of the negundo maple and the tree of heaven." "Trees of heaven can reach nearly 30 meters high, with branches of 160 meters wide." "Perhaps what is most remarkable is their huge variety of chemical molecules, including herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, bactericides and virucides." "These are invasive and harmful plants, but who isn't seduced by their beauty?" "The knotweed has become an ornamental plant." "To achieve their goals, invasive plants know how to seduce us." "Perhaps all plants manipulate us with their exquisiteness." "Citizens are so lacking in greenery, that their sheer presence has become vital." "Plants can count on our partnership to break into our cities." "Armies of green warrior movements have slowly appeared in a fight to make cities more vegetal." "They claim the right to a greener city." "Armed with seed grenades and hoes, they want the concrete to bloom and billboards and cars to go green, literally." "While many plants thrive well on walls and defy concrete, plants have not yet won the battle to live permanently on our asphalt." "But the idea germinates amongst many visionaries." "We started with the Champs-Elysees." "Today we're in Lyon." "Tomorrow we continue in Sao Paulo, New York," "Berlin and other cities." "It's about making this a poetic collage while being impetuous, which speaks of silence, of nature and of the rustle of the wind, all set in urban places, where the noise of cars is omnipresent." "It's along pavement, squares and in the heart of cities, in public spaces that no longer belong to the public." "And that's why it touches the soul, like some kind of a revelation." "Here is the Bellecour Square of Lyon, the largest pedestrian square in Europe." "The idea here is to have 150 varieties of plants that evoke biodiversity." "Their race against time to vegetate the immense square will last three days and two nights." "Bringing nature into the city, as we do, is totally absurd." "But it's a dream, a childhood dream, where you go to bed at night surrounded by the sound of traffic, and you wake up in the morning in the fields." "It could be the Champs-Elysees, Bellecour," "Time Square in New York." "The stronger the emotion, the more absurd it is, the more it feels right." "I think what people like about this is it's really a very collagic effect." "It's collage, and the idea of collage is to shock through opposition." "And it's what I believe we've done on the High Line, where one's reception, one's experience and reception of nature" "in terms of weather, light, seasons, time, designed nature and undesigned nature." "I think people really like that sense of time." "That's what wild nature, in a sense, brings to people, a sense of time, a sense of season, a sense of new birth and new life in the spring, and death in the winter." "You don't really get that if you only think of parks and gardens in a traditional sense." "Today's city dwellers seek out wild urban nature settings." "They want this comeback of natural vegetation." "They enjoy having their heads in the greens with their feet on the tarmac." "Even if there's no more room to create new parks and public gardens, plants can rely on the imagination of architects and botonists to help them conquer the walls and rooftops of all kinds of buildings." "20 years ago, I imagined working in the city with green walls and vertical gardens." "It was a way for me to introduce living matter into the city." "I wanted to push this idea a lot further, to work with everything living and re-vegetate the city." "People are unhappy in our cities, made of concrete and artificial materials." "To find what me miss the most, we have to take root in the city like plants do, not a vegetal city that is simply decorative, but a vegetal city where plants play a far more important role than a simple aesthetic one." "Plants play an important role in cleaning the air so we can breathe easy in the city." "Green walls are like mini de-polluting factories using basic elements, air, water, plants and earth with bacteria." "Exhaust fumes are captured by plants, and these pollutants are decomposed by bacteria that feed on them." "The extraordinary abilities of plants are their best assets, and this imposes them on our walls." "The lords of green also inspire Luc Schuiten for tomorrow's means of transport." "A car can also be directly inspired by something that has grown from nature." "Here is a knot that looks like growing tree branches that have spread in the curves and that form the rigidity of the structure." "I can also draw inspiration from a leaf that curls and creates a dynamic that is very specific to everything that nature produces." "If Luc Schuiten's biovegetal vehicles are not quite ready for tomorrow, an American engineer is vegetalizing buses in New York." "This is Bus Roots." "The project is proposing to install a green roof on top of city buses to increase the amount of green space in the cities." "Green roofs, in general plants, they capture CO2 and provide us with oxygen." "They also capture rainwater." "They insulate the buildings where the plants are." "They also lower the Urban Heat Island Effect." "The plants used by Marco Castro Cosio are essentially sedums, well known for their endurance to drought." "They are rarely thirsty." "They store water in their globular leaves." "It was only natural for Marco Castro Cosio to establish his headquarters in his biobus." "This is some of the buses, what they may look like." "If we look closer, we can see how they could be attached, could have the layers of moisture and drainage on the plants' layer." "This is another version, which would be like a suspended system." "It's like a hammock, which is similar to what the biobus has right now." "This is the vines." "This is the lightest weight system." "The plants are growing on the side, and the vines start covering the roof in the middle." "I would love to see the roofs of every city bus in New York to be covered with plants." "So it would be nice to be on a bridge and see all these buses passing by, and you could recognize them by, oh, there goes the lavender bus, or there goes the basil bus." "All plants that grow absorb CO2." "This is totally harmonious with our activities." "Plant matter was the building material from the beginning." "It's only recently that we thought we could go further and build with completely artificial materials." "This is a bamboo house that grew in just three months." "This is obviously a short period, and it is an immense advantage over trees." "Bamboo has a total lifetime of 30 years, which is that of a family, of one generation." "It will be a nice way to inhabit growing, living structures and totally adapt it to the lifespan of a generation." "The secrets of bamboo are hidden beneath its microscopic structure, in the honeycomb type cells that ensure rigidity." "Inside each cell, spring shaped fibers make up the backbone of the plant, giving bamboo such remarkable strength." "Luc Schuiten is looking to the future, but he has no doubt that plants, through millions of years of evolution, have many answers to our problems." "One of his dreams is of a green, vegetal city, where the lotus plant is used as a key building material, a plant of great interest to the building industry." "The vision of Luc Schuiten to use lotus as roof or lotus plants as walls for housing is extremely fascinating." "Still, you can learn a lot from that, and that is what the Lotusan can do." "You can have the self-cleaning effect on a well." "The results are highly convincing." "The dirty wall without a Lotusan will have this effect on water." "The water runs down the wall, but it takes no dirt with it." "Now, if you do the same with the Lotusan color, again, there's a lot of dirt, but only before the rain." "Once the rain droplets go on, they pick up the dirt." "What is the secret of the lotus effect?" "To understand, place a leaf sample in an electron microscope and magnify several thousand times." "The leaf surface of the lotus reveals thousands of peaks." "A surface on which water droplets bounce off without being able to spread." "The lotus, in a self-cleaning process, seeks to protect itself against microbial colonization." "For Luc Schuiten, reality has already caught up with Utopia." "He has imagined a city where humans are not afraid to breathe in deeply, a sustainable city where humans are nature's friend." "I believe there's a true incentive to return to the living, because it's 100% sustainable." "Life is what we are by definition." "The proximity of organisms that grow, that are alive, is certainly something that very closely resembles our own lives."