SACRED BONES RECORDS
Mort Garson - Mother Earth's Plantasia (2026 Reissue) Mort Garson
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.
In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bellbottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/ former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the book shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon.
Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking 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 craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you 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 device called the Moog.
The album gained an enormous cult following decades after its release. Sacred Bones’ 2019 reissue helped introduce 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 re-embraced by a new generation of listeners and flourishing far beyond its original moment, evolving from obscure novelty into a beloved cult classic and streaming-era touchstone.
Now, 50 years after its original release, Mother Earth’s Plantasia marks a major anniversary moment. Half a century on, it continues to resonate - an enduring reminder of Mort Garson’s ability to make the synthetic feel strangely alive and the whimsical feel oddly profound.
Track List
1. Plantasia (3:23)
2. Symphony for a Spider Plant (2:41)
3. Baby’s Tears Blues (3:03)
4. Ode to an African Violet (4:04)
5. Concerto For Philodendron And Pothos (3:09)
6. Rhapsody In Green (3:28)
7. Swingin’ Spathiphyllums (2:59)
8. You Don’t Have To Walk A Begonia (2:31)
9. A Mellow Mood For Maidenhair (2:17)
10. Music To Soothe The Savage Snake Plant (3:23)
Pickup available at Cambridge
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Product information
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On the subject of pre-orders, please note than release dates can change (sometimes not until the scheduled release date). Please keep an eye on our website
Returns
Returns Procedure
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We will email you with instructions and a returns reference number. When returning items to us, you will need to take reasonable care to ensure they are not damaged in transit and that they are labelled clearly with the correct address & reference number (as provided by us) :
Relevant Record Café,
260 Mill Road
Cambridge,
CB1 3NF.
We reserve the right to not process returns sent to us without prior permission.
It’s your responsibility to retain possession and to take reasonable care of the goods in the period prior to return and until you send them back to us.
Your Right To Cancel An Order
Your right to cancel your order starts from the moment you place the order, and ends 14 days from the time you receive your order.
Non-Faulty Products
If you wish to return a product because it’s unwanted or it was ordered in error, please follow the returns procedure (see above).
We’ll happily accept a return as long as the product is still in its original shrink-wrapped packaging and is completely undamaged. You have 14 days from when you receive your order to notify us that you wish to return your order.
By opening a sealed product in any way (or using any digital download code accompanying your order), you waive your right to cancel or return your order.
Obviously we’d rather offer you store credit (in the form of a gift card), but if you’d prefer a refund, we promise to get this sorted within 14 days of receiving your return.
Please take care when ordering!
Faulty Products
If you believe you have purchased a faulty or damaged record, please follow the returns procedure (see above).
Once we receive your record, it will be tested by a member of staff in store.
If your record is deemed as faulty, you will be entitled to a refund, swap or store credit (to the same value as your initial purchase).
If this record is not deemed as faulty, we will not cover any additional postage and packaging costs incurred by either you or us, and we will not be able to offer you a refund, store credit or swap.
Basically, please be absolutely certain the record you have purchased is faulty before following the returns procedure. If possible, we suggest testing the record on different turntables and weighting the tone arm differently.
Steepletone and Crosley Record Players
After having several “faulty” records returned to us (that in actuality had nothing wrong with them), we cannot guarantee that any records we sell will play correctly Crosley or Steepletone branded record players.