1. Not a Tree: The Secret Botany of Palms

A palm tree isn't a tree at all — it's a giant grass, and that one fact unlocks everything strange about it. Colin and Christian dig into palm biology: why the trunk is a bundle of "straws" with no rings and no bark, the single growing point at the top that the whole plant lives or dies by (and that you've eaten as hearts of palm), and the family's 80-million-year, dinosaur-era history that once stretched to the Arctic. Plus the record-breakers: the 200-foot Colombian wax palm, the toddler-sized coco de mer seed, the talipot palm that blooms once and dies, and the coconut — a self-contained boat that colonized the Pacific by drifting. Episode one of two.