Mother Earth’s Plantasia: the cult album you should play to your plants
It was made by an easy-listening songwriter and given away free with mattresses. Now thanks to YouTube’s algorithm, Mort Garson’s Plantasia has become an underground hit
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”.
“So I put it on and, man, I absolutely immediately fell in love with it,” says Braaten, who now runs Sacred Bones Records. “There’s something about it that is immediately nostalgic. It takes you to this warm place in the past. It’s tickling those same senses as something from your childhood. I think people who didn’t even grow up with that stuff also feel that same warm sensation of … I don’t know. It’s very interesting.”