You Grow Girlâ„¢

MUSIC TO GROW PLANTS BY

Plant Music: Music to keep Your Plants Healthy and Happy
Music by: Baroque Bouquet
©1975 Transcontinent Record Sales, INC.

I’d like to have a flowery description for the music on this record that would match perfectly with the floweriness of the music. Unfortunately I can’t think of anything. My mind is completely blank. I think my inability to come up with something is a result of the disappointment that lies somewhere between what I expect a record to be at the moment of contact to what it actually is when the sounds hit my ears.

When I first laid eyes on this record I thought to myself, “I bet the music isn’t going to be great, but it’s still a good concept”. Well from the second the needle hit vinyl it was sheer audio tyranny. There’s no point to giving a play by play of songs on the album: they are all exactly the same.

You might like this record if you like plinky, tinky baroque. However I would hazard a guess that even real baroque aficionados (do they exist?) would have a hard time with it.

The best thing this record offers is back-of-the-jacket information about experiments relating to plants and music. According to an experiment by Pearl Weinberger (1968), plants exposed “to high pitched sounds can triple their growth.” If that’s true then our first experiment in The Lab: ”Can Cool It Now Save This Plant?” actually had some scientific merit.

Overall, this record isn’t what I wanted or expected it to be. I think that if my plants could communicate to me how they feel when I play this record, they’d agree with me. I don’t expect plants to ‘hear’ music the same way people do, but I do expect that they know what they want on some level. It’s just harder for them to move and seek out the perfect conditions. They have to accomplish this over generations by spreading their seeds and taking up root somewhere else. So when they do find themselves in the perfect environment, I’d imagine they’d try to stick to it as long as possible. Really hold on tight to that place and time. That’s what my plants were doing when I played this record; trying as hard as possible to make some kind of movement away from that place, and that time. -GS

Rating: The Seeker: When light is too dim a plant will stretch and grow too tall too fast in a desperate attempt to reach light. Dim music will cause the same as the plant attempts to grow as far away from the music as possible.