People love flowers and gardens, but, let's face it, not many people love botany. Fewer find their hearts beating faster about paleobotany. So, the makers of First Flower (PBS, Tuesday 8 p.m. ET), the upcoming NOVA special on the discovery of a fossil of a very old flowering plant, had a challenge injecting the topic with drama.

The effort shows in the documentary's quick cuts, tension-filled music, and the use of that old favorite—time-lapse photography with blossoms opening like popcorn. Most nature documentaries feature furry or slithery creatures that frighten or enchant human beings, and have sex with and/or eat each other. Plants just sit there very quietly.

What is dramatic about flowering plants—and what makes up the engrossing and informative part of this show—is the way they have changed over eons. We see how beauty is linked to efficient reproduction. Often the most seductive objects are the fittest, the most worthy to survive.

The human story begins with Chinese paleontologist Sun Ge who, after 10 years of slicing rocks out of limestone and volcanic ash layers in northern China, found the fossil of what he thought might be a flowering plant.

Sun brought the fossil to University of Florida paleobotanist David Dilcher, who'd been looking for traces of the earliest flower for some 35 years. Professor Dilcher assured Sun that what they came to call archaefructus (old fruit) was indeed a flowering plant and that it was probably 142 million years old—thus it could be called the first flower.

NOVA pushes hard on why we should care about Sun's discovery. We wouldn't have evolved, the show insists, without flowering plants, which give us food and medicine. I have to disagree: Certainly we are completely dependent on plants for the air we breathe, but we could have evolved, though differently, without the flowering ones.

The program isn't without compelling moments. It eventually lights on a human subject with high appeal, good sense, and originality. Dan Hinkley is a collector and explorer who is shown looking for plants in the Hengdaun Mountains of China, one of the most biodiverse temperate forests in the world.

Hinkley is not quite Jane Goodall and her chimps. But it's hard not to be moved by his finding dozens of gorgeous varied plants—examples of the diverse products of evolution—in an area literally about a yard square by the side of the road.