Mother Earth's Plantasia (50th Anniversary Edition)

Before Brian Eno did it, Mort Garson was making discreet music. Juilliard‑educated and active as a session player in the post‑war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored the 1969 moon landing, arranged plush orchestrations for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell's By the Time I Get to Phoenix.

In the mid‑1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class and rooting itself in homes, minds, and culture. It wasn't The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell‑bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. Written by occultist and former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent and dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the book shot up bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon.

Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom. Photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus hung off walls, lorded over bookshelves, and basked 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 wildest claim of the book was that plants also enjoyed music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or anything else 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 Moog synthesizer.

The album gained an enormous cult following decades after its release. Sacred Bones' 2019 reissue introduced Plantasia to a wider global audience, sparking a remarkable second life for Garson's unlikely masterpiece. What was once a strange artifact of 1970s plant‑mania has become a beloved evergreen, rediscovered and embraced by a new generation of listeners. It has flourished far beyond its original moment, evolving from obscure novelty into a cult classic and streaming‑era touchstone.