Playlist For Plant Parents
Mother Earth’s Plantasia has an interesting origin story. The ambient electronic instrumental album was originally only sold at the Mother Earth plant store in Los Angeles, and it came with a free horticulture book written by the store’s owners, Joel and Lynn Rapp. If not bought there, you could also get a free copy of the album if you ordered a Simmons mattress from Sears. Bit of a weird marketing strategy there, in my opinion. Plantasia was not wildly popular when it first came out in 1976, but many years later, the YouTube algorithm shot the album into cult classic stardom. Its current state of popularity fits the current holistic/plant/self-care/pseudoscience spiral that we’re seeing right now; it was this wave of pseudoscience that brought forth works like Plantasia to the greenery obsessed masses in the 70s.
Personally, I stumbled across the album after seeing a photo of Finn Wolfhard wearing a Plantasia shirt. I was so fond of the design, I just had to look it up and learn more about it: a true testament to the power of great cover art. Initially, the album didn’t sweep me off my feet. Granted, I was a 16-year-old who had never listened to ambient music before and, at that time, I probably would have cried if someone tried to make me listen to anything other than my weird mixed playlists of indie, hip-hop, and K-pop. When I found myself working for my hometown of Sault Ste. Marie in the horticulture department this past summer, the thought of the album came to mind again. By then, I had broadened my musical horizons and learnt to appreciate ambient music, or rather, the importance of an instrumental track in and of itself. Songs like “Symphony for a Spider Plant” and “You Don’t Have to Walk a Begonia” caught my attention because I was actually working with these plants, caring for them in the greenhouse, and frequently incorporating them into garden bed designs.
Similarly to humans, plants can and do react to sounds. More specifically, they react to said sounds by first feeling and then processing the sounds’ vibrations. When some plants recognize vibrations that their predators produce while feeding, they become defensive, producing chemicals that protect them from herbivore attacks (like herbivore induced plant volatiles or HIPV - my bio majors know this one). When the plants were exposed to simulated vibrations that were in the same frequency range (while insects did something else other than feed on the plant), the plants underwent no changes. So, plants can specifically distinguish between a range of vibrations in their environment to a very specific degree, but does that have any tie to music?
A few years ago there was a big spike in belief that classical music would make your plant flourish and grow larger, whereas rock music would stress out the plant and make it wither. This is because the ‘correct’ vibrations (for that plant), can stimulate the cells causing an increase in growth. Some universities have even conducted studies on this phenomenon and found that playing classical music over a loudspeaker for crops boosted their yield by up to 60%! At the same time, other scientists have dismissed these results saying that the tests that show this crazy amount of growth need to ensure they’re eliminating as many confounding factors (variables that haven’t been controlled for, but can affect the results of a study) as possible to ensure that it really is just the music that is causing the changes.
Similar experiments have been repeated over the years, (with varying levels of scientific integrity) in order to determine the effects of music and its many different genres on the wellbeing and growth of their plants. From my understanding, there is still a mixed consensus. VICE did a week-long experiment that placed headphones around two plants: one playing Plantasia and the other a Megadeth album. Surprisingly, there was no visible effect on either plant. They seemed to be the same size, both just slightly bigger than at the start of the experiment, and neither was more or less healthy than the other. As someone with a lot of metalhead family members, it doesn’t take a week of being at home for too much metal to make me feel sick and wilted.
I honestly can’t say I’ve noticed any changes in my plants health that go along with the music blasting in my room on any given week. Though, to be fair, I only own a variety of succulents who’s growth goes unnoticed until suddenly they’re a few centimetres taller. To go with that, my daily playlists don’t really line up with what people believe to be the ‘correct’ music that will optimise the growth and well being of a plant but I think they’re doing good enough anyways. If you are interested in music that has been made with plants in mind, check out the playlist I’ve curated below. Even if you don’t have a green thumb, it also doubles as a pretty good study playlist!
References:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmp533/plantasia-mort-garson-experiment-houseplant-care
https://bloomscape.com/green-living/does-music-affect-plant-growth/
Header by: Valerie Letts