Originally released in 1976, the record was created for the listening attention of house plants and was one of the first ever to use a Moog. It's available digitally now and set for physical release on June 21st.

In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t 

The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a

book called The Secret Life of Plants.

 

The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the books shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon. Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was

in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls,

lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges.

 

The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies.

But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants. 
 
Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on

Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears),

you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them.

 

Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called

the Moog. Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants

loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.
 
Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno

did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous

as a Chlorophytum comosum.

 

Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings

around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles

and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. 

“An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. 

 

“I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”
 
But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered

Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast

Convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device.

 

With the Moog, those idearscould be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” 

Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any

household plant would. 

The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero 

Swamp Thingto Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, 

Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.

 

Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchersor the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown

pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself.
 
“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the

whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew

when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him

humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes. 
 
Garson may have given the album away to new plant and bed owners, but a decade later a new generation could hear his music in another surreptitious way. Millions of kids bought 

The Legend of Zelda for their Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1986 and one

distinct 8-bit tune bears more than a passing resemblance to album highlight 

“Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos.” Garson was never properly credited

for it, but he nevertheless subliminally slipped into a new generations’ head,

helping kids and plants alike grow.
 
Hearing Plantasia in the 21st tcentury, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’s new renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.

Sacred Bones and Atlas Obscura will also be co-presenting a Plantasia listening experience and workshop at Brooklyn Botanic Garden on June 18.

Sacred Bones has partnered with Discogs to help drive awareness for this cult classic album. The Discogs Database & Marketplace made it clear that this album was in high demand from the Discogs community. Discogs is confident based on the community intelligence that a much larger audience would love to add this record to their collection and will support Sacred Bones with a multitude of marketing elements to amplify the excitement around Plantasia within the massive Discogs user base. 

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