The Queen has invited David Attenborough over. To walk around her garden and talk about trees “and whatever else takes our fancy”, says Attenborough, tantalisingly, on The Queen’s Green Planet (ITV). Oh go on, ask her if she has been watching The Crown.
She has always loved trees, we learn. To prove it, there is some footage of her a long time ago with a tree. Now she has put her name to a splendid project, the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy, to create a global network of protected forest.
Two fine plane trees in the garden at Buckingham Palace were planted by her great-great-grandparents, Victoria and Albert. Sometimes they get crows nesting in them, she tells Attenborough. “We have to get people to remove them, because it’s not nice to have them outside your window,” she says. Oh. Couldn’t you get earplugs? Are you allowed to remove crows nests? I guess you are if you are the Queen. Diplomatically, Attenborough doesn’t pursue the subject.
There are family trees planted for her children, although they have problems establishing which is whose. Is that one Edward’s or Andrew’s? They are all oaks. It would have been more fun if they had planted trees to match their characters. Maybe a weeping ash for Charles – not just weeping, but all fuddled and tied in knots. Anne? Holly – cold and spiky … That said, if they did it when the children were born, I guess they wouldn’t have known how they were going to turn out.
Speaking of spiky, the Queen’s dogs don’t like the prickles on the horse chestnut husks, she says. Perhaps they get people to remove them, too. Wasn’t it ridiculous when someone tried to ban children playing conkers, they agree, health and safety gone mad. “Seems to me quite a harmless sort of battle thing,” says the Queen. You can do your own William I gags.
James I planted mulberry trees as food for silkworms, but he got the wrong kind of mulberry and the silkworms didn’t make any silk, she says, giggling. Bloody idiot. It is nice, a tiny split in her own slightly prickly husk for a glimpse of the conker within. There is more evidence of humour. “It sounds like President Trump,” she says, when a helicopter disturbs their chat. “Or Obama,” she adds, quickly, remembering diplomacy.
Attenborough, deferential to his fellow nonagenarian in person, is ever so slightly arch in his narration. “A sort of royal I-was-here,” he calls her tree-planting sprees. “There’s something life affirming about it. One, two, three shovels and people clap.”
“It’s what our family does,” says Prince Harry. “We travel the world planting trees.” Yes, the grandchildren are on board with the QCC project. Here, the roles do appear to have been matched to their personalities. William is in Canada, making a worthy speech in the rain. (And then bothering a salmon, grabbing it and hauling out of the river. Kate, too. Leave the wildlife alone!) Harry, meanwhile, is in the Caribbean, playing with kids, drumming and shaking his booty with the locals, before planting his tree. No sign of Meghan, but I feel her presence. I think she is responsible for all this – not the tree project (that was Labour MP Frank Field), but the fact that you can’t keep the new, less prickly Windsors off the telly at the moment.
Namibia doesn’t have many trees left. Angelina Jolie is there with all her children (not all of whom look happy about it), trying to do something about it. She has opened a nursery – the tree kind, not the children kind. I suppose Jolie is royalty of some kind; that is why she is involved.
Back in London, now inside the palace, the Queen is having a reception, presenting certificates to the high commissioners of the countries that have signed up, gently encouraging those who have yet to do so. Exercising soft power, Attenborough calls it.
Boris Johnson is here. He is also a tree enthusiast, apparently. “I, in an almost sort of teutonic way, rejoice when I get into a glade or a bosky nook of one kind or another,” he says. “I won’t say that in a teutonic way I disrobe …”
Eurgh, horrid image. Enough of your piffle, Johnson, this isn’t about you. It is about more important things: conservation, creating a network to safeguard the forests of the world and two famous old people walking around a London garden admiring even older trees.