Property News · November 14, 2021

Digging up Hollywood’s plant howlers


Painting out evidence of agricultural vehicles in Gladiator would have been easy – but film sets are full of botanical errorsAs someone who spends so much of his life fascinated by weeds growing in cracks in the pavement, I find it bizarre that to most of modern society plants are just a generic green backdrop to the natural world. I am not alone, either. Us botanists have actually coined a term, “plant blindness”, to describe the human tendency to subconsciously gloss over not just the importance, but even the very presence, of plants in our environment. Perhaps nowhere is this more the case than in the world of Hollywood, where despite every inch of each set being forensically agonised over by teams of specialists, there are almost always huge botanical errors. Niche pet peeve, I know, but I wonder how many of the following have also had you wanting to throw your popcorn at the screen.Sometimes it’s a simple matter of timing. When a background of North American giant redwoods pops up in Pride and Prejudice, set years before the plants were first widely introduced to Britain, I am sure no normal people bat an eyelid. But my mind starts to drift to how fascinating it is that the landscapes we so closely associate with particular eras never really looked like that at the time. The people planting these trees, which we in Britain named “Wellingtonias” in a tribute to the battle of Waterloo, would only ever have seen specimens that were tiny saplings. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Digging up Hollywood’s plant howlers

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