‘Nova’ sets out on a wild flower chase
Flowers are one of the ways we understand ourselves; they bear the chief weight of our metaphors for beauty and sex -- what does a bee even mean without a flower? -- and of growth and time and death. So thoroughly do we identify with flowers that we dress in their colors and spray ourselves with their scents to attract one another, although there is nothing innately human about it.
Of course, flowers were around long before poets appeared to apostrophize them, and their own beginnings are the stuff of the engaging “First Flower,” tonight’s edition of the PBS science series “Nova.” First and possibly most important, it is really nice to look at -- full, as it is, of flowers, seen close up and in time-lapse photography that is no less impressive for being an old trick. (They follow the sun!) The high-definition video seems to pop even on the decidedly low-definition set I watch; much of the program takes place on China’s astonishingly beautiful and peerlessly biodiverse Hengduan Mountains, where many of the flowers that live in our own gardens -- including rhododendrons, magnolias and primroses -- originated and still grow wild. The area forms a floral Shangri-La, “a living museum of plant evolution,” having more or less escaped the Ice Age. (The question is now whether it will escape the Us Age: It is an endangered ecosystem.)
At the program’s center is the fossil of a plant named Archaefructus liaoningensis that may or may not be the first flower. (The title is a bit of a cheat, as there is no way to know this, a fact the program’s talking heads eventually acknowledge.) But at 125 million years old, it remains the earliest complete picture of a flowering plant we have.
Along with the pretty pictures, there is plenty of science here, all about how plants reproduce -- please remember to get your permission slips signed -- and how every species is a picture of the fight for its own survival, and other things you may have learned in school but forgotten. Genetic studies reveal surprising connections between plants -- that the lotus and the sycamore are kissing cousins, as the strawberry is to marijuana -- and suggest a candidate for the oldest extant species: amborella, found only on the island of New Caledonia.
Writer-director Doug Hamilton spends perhaps a little too much energy on creating drama around the “oldest flower” question, suppressing the actual timeline to make the hunt seem like a breakneck competition, when in fact Archaefructus was discovered and identified nearly a decade ago. (The opening moments of the episode resemble nothing so much as an episode of “The Amazing Race.”) An overdramatic ethno-techno soundtrack amps up the tension and mystery throughout.
These are not fatal flaws, and “Nova” is usually as much about scientists as about science, the discoverer in some sense being inextricable from the discovery and there being more of an obvious narrative in one man’s obsession than in the multimillion-year history of, say, a peony. Apart from the flowers themselves, the show’s most vivid moment comes when “plant explorer” Dan Hinkley, exploring a fantastically rich patch of roadside flora in the Hengduans, reacts like the World’s Greatest Movie Fan set down in the middle of an A-list Hollywood party.
“Oh, jeez!” he cries, rocking back on his heels. “This is extraordinary.... There’s a lot of people that would love to be right here this moment ... standing in yak dung.” He is very happy.
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‘Nova: First Flower’
Where: KCET
When: 8 tonight
Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)
