“It would be difficult to imagine a more hostile place for a plant,” David Attenborough says as he walks a bustling Piccadilly Circus in an episode of the BBC’s Green Planet series.
“And yet even here, plants will find a way.”
Leafs are seen pushing their way through concrete in the BBC programme, which explores the secret lives of plants. But now, nature is being brought to life in a completely different way.
Away from glaring adverts, streams of red buses and crowds piling through one of London’s busiest squares, there is a small oasis of plants tucked away in a building on the corner.
Walk past these and there is a whole other world of tropical rainforests, barren landscapes and underwater life - in virtual reality.
Plug in your headsets, move around your device and a hologram Attenborough takes you through the secret life of plants and the role they play in their ecosystems.
The veteran broadcaster appears onscreen - surrounded at different times by the tropical trees, cacti and in a boat on a pond - as nature comes to life in the virtual world.
Bolsa trees grow to the size of six-storey buildings, which you can only see by pointing your screen up to the sky, in the tropic rainforest zone. Later on, fire lilies emerge in a barren landscape ravaged by fire.
Elsewhere, 400,000 blades of seagrass swish about in a simulated underwater world. Here, you are reminded these plants are key to capturing carbon from the atmosphere.
Michael Gunton, Green Planet’s executive producer, points to the plants all around the entrance to the virtual experience. “These are our greatest allies in the climate emergency,” he tells The Independent.
“Everyone knows what woodlands and that is, but then you have got things like seagrass and desert plants, that are actually really important for carbon,” Tim Utteridge, a senior researcher from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew - who was involved in the project - says.
“As the world wakes up to carbon storage and preserving habitats and restoration, people are going to say: we need more plants.”
The Green Planet AR Experience at Piccadilly Circus, Powered by EE 5G is free to book and will run between 11 February and 9 March.
