Data Garden's MIDI Sprout device is designed to translate electrical impulses from plants into musical notes.

After listening to this, it somehow becomes obvious as to why this was made as ‘music for plants’. It’s so delicate and uplifting yet magical and complex, not dissimilar from nature. I have found that I enjoy this album most in natural settings, such as morning walks amongst greenery or sunbathing, and I think that is what Garson intended when creating such a special project. A beautifully wholesome album. 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 idears could be transformed.

Electronic music is not normally a genre that hugely peaks my interest, but when I read that this album was made specifically for plants to listen to? Now THAT interested me. What do plants like to listen to? What did Mort Garson think classified as ‘music for plants’? As it turns out, the result is rather beautiful. There is a certain vibe on Plantasia that I have been perennially chasing my entire life. It’s a certain way with melody, slightly schmaltz, but deadly serious. Slightly occult, but also heavenly” – James Pants, DJ/producer By the late 50s, Garson had worked his way into writing or co-writing hits for pop artists like Brenda Lee and Cliff Richard. Then, in 1962, Garson composed “ Our Day Will Come” with lyricist Bob Hilliard for American R&B group Ruby & the Romantics. When it was released the following year, it topped the Hot 100 Billboard chart and sold well over a million copies. “It was his biggest moneymaker, and he did some silly things with the royalty rights, but I think it was a learning curve for him,” Darmet says. “You know that saying, is the glass half full or half empty? My dad’s glass was always full, so full that it was overflowing with positiveness. If you lost it, the glass would fill up again. He didn’t have that fear of not being able to create something great again and generate what’s needed. If there are any qualities I’ve gotten from him, that’s one of them.”

a b "Mother Earth's Plantasia Gets First Official Vinyl Reissue". Pitchfork. Condé Nast. 22 March 2019 . Retrieved 19 April 2019. The album also gained popularity on YouTube, with the full album (uploaded without permission) gaining millions of views and thousands of comments spread over multiple different bootleg uploads. [9] Before Brian Eno did it, Mort Garson was making discreet music. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored the 1969 moon-landing and plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell's By the Time I Get to Phoenix. THE FIRST AUTHORIZED REISSUE OF MORT GARSON'S LEGENDARY 1976 ALBUM OF MOOG MUSIC FOR PLANTS. INCLUDES THE ORIGINAL MOTHER EARTH'S INDOOR PLANT CARE BOOKLET 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 idears could be transformed. "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.Darmet lives in San Francisco, the city where Garson spent his final years, where she runs the boutique Day Darmet Catering company with her business partner, Florence Raynaud. When I call, she’s happy to discuss her father, but admits she’d previously spent years ignoring phone calls and throwing letters about his music from advertising and movie companies in the bin. It was Braaten’s approach and energy that led her to trust him with her father’s music. “Otherwise, it would have just been sitting in a box in the basement,” she says. “My father was all about the music. On his grave, it says, ‘Let the music play on.’ I think it's fair to say the music is playing on, and part of his legacy is still here and living.” This renewed interest in plant-based music also comes at the same time that the houseplant industry is booming. To capitalize on this demand, there are entire side industries of plant management apps and plant delivery services for a new generation of obsessive plant owners. Everyone has their own way of coping with possible cataclysmic doom. "In Brooklyn where I live, there's a f****** new plant store on every corner. It's the new coffee shop," says Sacred Bones' Braaten, who admits that he, too, loves gardening. Martoccio, Angie (2019-12-12). "Revisiting the Weird World of Seventies Plant Music". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on 2021-05-18 . Retrieved 2021-05-18. Not long after “Our Day Will Come” topped the charts, the Garson family headed west. In Los Angeles, Garson spent the mid-60s working with a who’s who of easy-listening pop stars from the era, including Doris Day and Glen Campbell, until one fateful day in 1967, he attended the Audio Engineering Society's West Coast convention. There, he met the man who invented the Moog modular synthesiser, Robert Moog. Darmet compares her father’s encounter with Moog to the moment French Nouveau Réalisme painter and performance artist Yves Klein made the colour that would become known as ‘ International Klein Blue’ the singular focus of his Blue Epoch. It was an instrument that he totally resonated with. “He got to a certain point and was like, ‘Screw it, I’m going to do what I want’,” says Darmet. “Once he got the Moog and put it in his studio at home, he was there all the time. He was 100 per cent stimulated, and he needed to keep going with this until he couldn’t.”

Petridis, Alexis (2019-07-09). "Mother Earth's Plantasia: the cult album you should play to your plants". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-10-16. When you hear it, it's so mysterious, yet so familiar. I think that's part of the reason why people have connected with it” – Caleb Braaten, Sacred Bones Records 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 ide ar” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.” The music on it was composed specifically for plants to listen to. [6] Garson was inspired by his wife, who grew many plants in their home. [7] Garson used a Moog synthesizer to compose the album, the first album on the West Coast composed entirely on the Moog synthesizer. [7] My father was all about the music. On his grave, it says, ‘Let the music play on.’ I think it's fair to say the music is playing on, and part of his legacy is still here and living” – Day Darmet, Mort Garson’s daughter

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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." The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to 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 Snatchers or 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. 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.” Among the numerous off-the-wall claims Tompkins and Bird made in The Secret Life of Plants, their suggestion that plants loved music proved surprisingly enduring. Music, they wrote, had the capacity to help plants grow rapidly and beautifully, if administered correctly. But before their owners were playing them Stevie Wonder’s new age meditations on plants and their secrets, there was another record that was hip with West Hollywood’s leaf lovers.Over time, most of the experiments referenced in The Secret Life of Plants book were discredited. They weren't designed to rule out other explanations that were equally plausible and their results couldn't be replicated by other researchers. Nowadays, most academics regard the book as pseudoscience. "We know that [plants] have all the same kind of senses we do, but they don't have specialized organs for them," explains Heidi Appel, a plant biologist and professor at the University of Toledo. "People always underestimate plants at one level, because they aren't like us, and yet our propensity to anthropomorphize everything — to project the way we see the world, we view the world, we think about the world — on other things that are not human means that we also have this ability to overestimate what plants can do." 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 idears could 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. Plantasia arrived three years after the release of Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird's book The Secret Life of Plants, which appeared on The New York Times' bestselling nonfiction list amongst titles like The Joy of Sex and How to Be Your Own Best Friend. In The Secret Life of Plants, Tompkins and Bird recounted experiments conducted around the planet that supposedly proved that plants were far more complex and cosmically attuned beings than most humans imagined. One of its central claims was that the health and productivity of plants could be affected not only by playing music for them, but by what kind of music you played for them.