Queen Elizabeth's 'awful' request took David Attenborough by surprise and led to awkward 'guess'
She and the British conservationist were born months apart and Sir David teamed up with her for a special documentary project in 2018
A few weeks after the late Queen Elizabeth’s centenary renowned conservationist Sir David Attenborough is celebrating his 100th birthday. The two British icons met multiple times throughout the Queen's reign, but one occasion sounds particularly memorable.
She and David teamed up for a special documentary in 2018, The Queen’s Green Planet, and an unexpected situation unfolded. Speaking to ITV after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 2022, Sir David light-heartedly described how "awful" it was when the monarch asked him to check the plaques on trees at Buckingham Palace.
"That was awful for me because she planted certain trees when her children [were born] and she had asked me just to check on the notice which said what the tree was and I couldn’t find my glasses," he revealed.
David had seemingly not anticipated this and continued, "Not only could I not find my glasses, but the placard itself was overgrown with moss, so I had to make a kind of guess. Which was wrong!"
We actually get to see David Attenborough in the documentary making this mistake - even after finding his glasses. He’s heard identifying Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s tree before going to the next and saying that was Andrew’s as well. As soon as Her Majesty heard that she said, "They can’t both be", and it turned out one was actually Prince Edward’s…
In the documentary narration Sir David explains that the Queen was continuing Queen Victoria’s tradition by having a tree planted to honour her family members. The documentary explored the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy project which aimed to create a global network of protected forests in each Commonwealth country.
Whilst they strolled through the Buckingham Palace gardens Queen Elizabeth also made one of her famous quips. In response to the conservationist predicting there would be all different types of trees growing in 50 years, she said, "Might easily be, yes. I won’t be here though."
At the time she and David filmed the documentary they were both 91 and a frank joke about her own mortality perhaps showcased how comfortable she was around him. The pair met years earlier and he produced her Christmas broadcasts for years.
That history together meant he had plenty more Queen Elizabeth anecdotes to share and he also spoke to ITV about his "favourite" personal memory of her.
"I suppose the most precious things were hearing her laugh. Easy to make a polite laugh isn’t it? But when she laughed in a genuine way, if there was something funny she laughed in a genuine way, she wasn’t putting it on," he said. "And that made it very easy because she was an expert at getting people to relax."
David Attenborough thinks that Queen Elizabeth was someone who you knew was "extremely important in our society" and yet "she made it seem like you were meeting another human being with exactly the same sort of conditions that all human beings have". He makes an excellent point that it was a real skill to meet as many people as she did and still have everyone feel like they’d made a connection with her.
