Album Review
April 13, 2025
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Mother Earth’s Plantasia vinyl cover
The 70s were a tumultuous yet uniquely creative time, fueled by the intersection of global economic instability, war, and overall civil unrest. Everyone from every corner of the planet was looking for new ways to cope with, live alongside, outright reject, or fight against the geopolitics of the time.
The happy hippie image of the 60s ended with the breakup of The Beatles in early 1970, giving way to filthier rock bands like The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. The dominant music scene was darker and grittier, but still influenced by one substance or another. Subcultures like punk, glam rock and heavy metal were expanding rapidly.
The era is not necessarily remembered for its closeness to nature or appreciation for life, be it the artists’ own lives, or the life and wellbeing of the planet.
And yet, primarily across America, an era of New Age spirituality had moved in, bringing with it an enthusiasm for yoga, meditation, personal transformation – and the occult, of course. This movement carried all the ingredients that would come together and give us Mother Earth’s Plantasia, an electronic album for plants geniusly crafted by Mort Garson.
Allow me to set the scene and take you through the album's history up to the present day.
Future composer, arranger and songwriter Morton Sanford Garson was born in 1924 in New Brunswick, Canada. By the 40s, Garson had moved to New York City to study at Juilliard School of Music. He served in the Army’s Special Services at the end of WWII. After the war, Garson became an in-demand musician who, by the late 1950s, hadkicked off a strong career.
Garson met inventor Bob Moog at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention in Los Angeles, where Moog was demonstrating one of his early synthesizers. Garson would become one of the first composers to work with the Moog synthesizer, which was pivotal in popularizing the instrument.
Mort Garson was tasked with composing the soundtrack for the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 lunar mission. His work on this mission is single-handedly responsible for the association between synthesizers and space in the public eye.
Though much of his music has a nostalgic quality to us now, it was considered the sound of the future then. That nostalgia can largely be attributed to the technological limitations of the 60s; you must remember the Moog synthesizer was brand new at this time. Synthesizers have evolved nearly sixty years since then.
In Los Angeles on Melrose Avenue, a new shop was opened by Hollywood couple Lynn and Joel Rapp: Mother Earth Plant Boutique. Though it was just an indoor plant shop, the Rapps cultivated a magnetic and special space, its “cool factor” reinforced by the constant stream of celebrity clientele.
Occultist and former OSS agent Peter Tompkins collaborated with dowsing enthusiast and former CIA agent Christopher Bird to write a book titled, “The Secret Life of Plants: a Fascinating Account of the Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Relations Between Plants and Man.”
While a lot of it may read as pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo – including the claims that plants have the power of telepathy and lie detection – Tompkins and Bird’s suggestion that plants love music endures to this day. The belief was that specific kinds of music would help plants to grow faster, healthier and more beautiful and others might stunt their growth, or cause them to wilt.
Electronic music pioneer Mort Garson took Tompkins and Bird’s study very seriously and thus, Mother Earth’s Plantasia was conceived. Garson’s wife Peggy was a huge factor behind the inspiration of the album’s creation as well, an avid gardener and lover of the Earth.
Mother Earth’s Plantasia started as promotional material to be given out alongside the purchase of plants at the boutique. On top of receiving an album designed to help your plant grow and flourish, you’d also get an indoor plant care booklet written by Joel and Lynn Rapp themselves, dedicated greenthumbs and successful authors by this time.
As part of a bigger sales campaign designed to draw in more customers to Mother Earth, Plantasia received little fanfare outside of the boutique’s clientele. Novelty and promotional records were common at the time, perhaps the equivalent of receiving a free sticker with your purchase today.
But Garson’s goal with Plantasia was not to sell it en masse; after all, this was not an album intended for human consumption. It was for plants.
With ten dreamy tracks named after plants, Plantasia was created entirely using the Moog synthesizer. Each song is unique, crafted specifically for the plant in the title: spider plants and baby’s tears, pothos and begonias – and my favorite, spathiphyllums.
While plants don’t have ears to hear music, there is proof (found by agricultural scientists via controlled experimentation) that plant cells do indeed react to sound waves. According to a 2020 article from Pistils Nursery, “for most plants playing classical or jazz music caused growth to increase, while harsher metal music induced stress.” The understanding is that louder, more aggressive music emitted sound waves that stimulated the plants too much, exhausting and wilting them.
Seven years after Garson’s passing, one of the first unofficial versions of Plantasia was uploaded to YouTube. With the power of the internet, Plantasia spread far and wide. The gentle whimsy of the Moog synthesizer, reminiscent of 8-bit video game soundtracks, made Plantasia a treasured album to thousands.
In light of its online success, Sacred Bones Records, settled in Brooklyn New York, announced the first authorized reissue of Plantasia since 1976 – and its first mass production.
Officially available across all platforms, this reissue reignited the internet’s love for the strangeness and comfort of Plantasia, an album with its roots buried far and wide.
So long as there are still house plants, Plantasia will maintain its cult classic status. And though Mort Garson isn’t a super recognizable name today, he is cemented within pop culture history as a legend and pioneer of the electronic genre – one that likely would not exist as it is without him.
Dazed Magazine interviewed Garson’s daughter, Day Darmet, shortly before Plantasia’s official reissue. Darmet said, “On his grave, it says, ‘Let the music play on.’”
And indeed, the music plays on… for plants, and the people who love them.
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