In the early noughties, Caleb Braaten was working in a secondhand record shop in Denver, Colorado, when he came across an album that looked intriguing. The cover of Mother Earth’s Plantasia featured a cartoon of two people cuddling a houseplant, and came with a free horticultural booklet. Best of all, it claimed that its intended audience wasn’t human: you were supposed to play its “warm Earth music” to plants “to aid in their growing”.
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It was the work of the late Mort Garson, a musician and easy-listening songwriter who co-wrote Our Day Will Come, the 1963 Ruby and the Romantics single later covered by everyone from James Brown to Amy Winehouse, and an arranger responsible for the shimmer of strings on Glen Campbell’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix. He was also a film and TV composer whose music soundtracked the US broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and a synthesiser pioneer who probably should be mentioned in the same breath as early electronics heroes Wendy Carlos, Beaver and Krause, and Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff.
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Quite aside from the cosseting loveliness of its warm synth tones and melodies, part of Plantasia’s appeal rests in the way it summons up a lost post-hippy age, a mid-70s moment when the kind of far-out ideas that would previously have been discussed in dope smoke-filled rooms in San Francisco or Notting Hill became mainstream. It was an era in which Erich von Däniken sold millions of paperbacks with his was-God-an-astronaut postulations about the ancient world and the pseudoscientific book The Secret Life of Plants – which suggested plants had emotions, and thus might respond to music – hit bestseller lists.
