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SPEAKER_10: This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The other day, the writer Anne Helen Peterson was watching Martin Scorsese's 1993 film, The Age of Innocence. First of all, The Age of Innocence is low key my favorite Scorsese, which is blasphemy. But I just love the movie a lot.
SPEAKER_05: That is a bold choice, Anne Helen Peterson, and I am here for it.
SPEAKER_10: People are always like, oh, but all of his films are so violent. And The Age of Innocence is an emotionally violent movie.
SPEAKER_05: So it's just operating in a different register. It's sublime. I love it so much. The Age of Innocence looks really different from any of Scorsese's other films.
SPEAKER_12: It's not set in some gritty criminal underworld. It doesn't have Robert De Niro in it. It looks almost like a merchant ivory film, a Gilded Age costume drama set in New York. That's producer, Emmett Fitzgerald. It's the kind of film that you watch to get lost in the rose gardens and the frilly dresses and the wallpaper drawing rooms. But on this particular rewatch, Anne noticed something else about the set design that really stood out. The houses were packed to the gills with plants.
SPEAKER_05: I was so fascinated by just how prevalent houseplants were throughout the entire film and actually serve as a really important backdrop for several pivotal scenes.
SPEAKER_12: Throughout the movie, the characters wander between giant ferns and palms, the kinds of plants that you might find in a swanky boutique hotel today. In fact, when I see the plants in the Age of Innocence, they look almost anachronistic to me. Like, you can imagine the production designer buying them at Lowe's. Well, I think oftentimes people don't think that anyone other than us had houseplants somehow, right?
SPEAKER_05: There's just this assumption that, like, somehow houseplants are a creation of contemporary society, contemporary decorating, you know, like something that is as new as IKEA, say.
SPEAKER_12: And, I mean, it's true that houseplants are having a moment right now. In 2020, 66 percent of people in the U.S. owned at least one houseplant, and plant sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Meanwhile, Instagram accounts like Houseplant Club have over a million followers. And over the past decade, there's been a steady stream of think pieces offering explanations for the emergence of this new obsession, from the rise of wellness culture to the fact that more young people are living in cities. But one thing that these articles don't usually do is put our current houseplant boom in historical perspective. Because while millennials may have perfected the art of plant parenting, Ann is here to tell you this is not the first time people have gotten completely obsessed with houseplants.
SPEAKER_05: There's so much history packed into this unassuming artifact that's in your home. And so I had been thinking a little bit about what could that history be.
SPEAKER_10: If you think about it, the entire idea of the houseplant is pretty bizarre. We take plants that grow naturally in one place, and then we move them halfway around the world to an entirely different place with a different, often inhospitable climate. And then we keep them alive by growing them in potting soil that we probably bought at the Home Depot.
SPEAKER_12: Which, you know, raises a lot of questions, like for one, why? We'll get to that later. But also when, as in, when did we start engaging in this weird ritual?
SPEAKER_10: Humans have been growing plants indoors for a long time, especially herbs and flowers. Ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Middle Eastern societies all had potted plants. The Chinese were growing ornamental plants indoors as far back as 1000 BC. But the rise of the global houseplant economy that we are familiar with today really begins during the age of European imperialism.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, they really began with the start of colonization. So you have these powers in Europe who are going out to the corners of the known world and encountering so many new flora and fauna. Also, of course, people. But for the purposes of this story, we're going to stay focused on the plants.
SPEAKER_12: This was the Enlightenment era, and European scientists were obsessed with cataloging and collecting all of the new species that they encountered. And so on many of these expeditions, they would actually bring along people whose entire job was to hunt for plants.
SPEAKER_10: Here's interior design historian Penny Spark from Kingston University in London.
SPEAKER_06: The plant hunters themselves were sort of intrepid people, often hired by the scientists or by the kings or by the very wealthy who wanted plants brought back. They just went and hunted out in the wild and, you know, up mountains, into forests, into jungles, bringing back everything they could. And the more exotic, the better. They put them in boxes and transported them over many months-long voyages back to the cold climate of Europe.
SPEAKER_10: But the transportation part proved to be a bit of a challenge. Unsurprisingly, the plants didn't do so well on ships floating in the ocean for weeks at a time.
SPEAKER_05: And they would just die on the way, always.
SPEAKER_12: People in this period believed that plants needed fresh air to survive. But on a sea voyage, they ended up just dying from exposure to the elements. By one estimate, only one in 1,000 live plant specimens would survive the journey back to Europe.
SPEAKER_06: And so there were all sorts of experiments undertaken to try and find ways of preserving the plants. And one of the most successful was something called a Wardian case, designed by somebody called Nathaniel Ward. The Wardian case was like a small portable greenhouse.
SPEAKER_10: The plants were sealed off from the outside world and got their water through the cycle of evaporation and condensation. It was an enclosed case that actually allowed moisture to go back into the plant and keep it alive.
SPEAKER_05: And essentially what it did was create this moist environment inside that approximated a jungle.
SPEAKER_10: In 1833, two Wardian cases were sent to Australia, and they returned a year later full of plants. Ward wrote, these plants were not once watered during the whole voyage, yet on their arrival at the docks, they were in the most healthy and vigorous condition. From that point on, the Wardian case became a key tool for colonial plant traders.
SPEAKER_12: But keeping the plants alive once they got back to Europe also proved to be a challenge. They were evolved to grow in steamy jungles and parched deserts. They weren't going to thrive in cold, rainy countries like England or France on their own. And so European gardeners needed to build indoor spaces that would approximate the climates of India, Australia, and the Caribbean.
SPEAKER_05: And so they created botanical gardens all over Europe, and some parts of them were private and used for more scientific purposes, and some parts of them were public and open to anyone who could browse this array, this demonstration of empire and of conquest in a very secure and safe environment. The plants were called exotics, and the European public flocked to botanical gardens to marvel at all of these strange new species that they had never seen before.
SPEAKER_05: Think about a palm arriving. If all you've ever experienced really in terms of trees is deciduous trees and evergreen trees, then you have a palm. Like, what is this? How does it live? Botanical gardens also provided an opportunity for Europeans to see what the natural world might have looked like in the colonies.
SPEAKER_12: They were almost like imperial theme parks. And growing these tropical plants in Europe was a demonstration of conquest and control. And so what you do with these wild plants, even just the idea of calling them wild, right, and exotic,
SPEAKER_05: you bring them back and you civilize them. You put them in a pot and then you keep them indoors. Public botanical gardens were many houseplants' first step in their journey out of the jungle.
SPEAKER_10: The next step brought them closer to the home itself. The European aristocracy grew so enchanted with tropical exotics that they wanted greenhouses of their own,
SPEAKER_12: so they started building conservatories on their estates. And as indoor plants became fashionable status symbols, the desire to have your very own conservatory filtered down to the middle classes.
SPEAKER_10: Then, in the middle of the 19th century, England got rid of a really high tax on glass,
SPEAKER_12: and that made conservatories available to a much wider swath of the population. So, whereas the wealthy estates, country estates, would have greenhouses and conservatories on the land,
SPEAKER_06: a middle-class suburban home would want its own little conservatory. And increasingly, these conservatories were attached to houses. They weren't situated at the greenhouse, at the back of the garden. They were actually attached. This was all happening at the dawn of urbanization and industrialization in Europe,
SPEAKER_12: as lots of people moved off the land and into the city for the very first time. And that was the first moment, really, I think, when a generation of people had left the land and left living within nature and gone into the urban setting.
SPEAKER_06: They realized something was missing. So they had a huge loss, sense of loss.
SPEAKER_12: And these conservatories were a way to try to deal with that loss and bring nature back into people's lives.
SPEAKER_10: On a traditional country estate, the gardener would have been a man, but in the city, indoor plant care fell to women. This was happening at the same time as the rise of separate spheres ideology. Men were expected to go out into the city and work.
SPEAKER_06: And the woman is the person left at home to do nurturing of children, but also of plants.
SPEAKER_12: Victorian women shared scientific knowledge and plant care tips in these advice books that circulated widely at the time. The writers of these books were almost like the Instagram plant influencers of their day. They would teach people the scientific names of plants, how often to water them, how to make sure they got enough light.
SPEAKER_10: Indoor plants got more and more popular in this period until they eventually outgrew the conservatory and moved inside the house.
SPEAKER_06: Yes, it is. It is a gradual infiltration of the home. Again, the advice books will tell you there's ways in which you can actually bring plants into your drawing room, your parlor. You can construct so many containers or shelving systems or window boxes, hanging baskets. There was a whole industry of containers, really.
SPEAKER_12: The Victorian period was a high watermark for houseplants, and they became essential components of interior design. In the Victorian period, they became incredibly important elements of the interior scheme, if you like, the interior decor.
SPEAKER_10: The Victorians famously had an everything but the kitchen sink approach to interior design. There's a phrase I love that's sometimes used to describe the aesthetics from this period, horror vacui, which means the fear of empty space.
SPEAKER_06: You know, we use the word clutter a lot about these interior. I don't like to think of being cluttered. I think they were just very, very full, full of furniture, full of decorations, full of plants, full of everything.
SPEAKER_12: Victorians brought the unruly jungle inside and filled up their homes with many of the same varieties of houseplants that we have today.
SPEAKER_06: The fern was incredibly popular. And of course, the palms. So the palm and the fern are perhaps the two dominant ones. And the fern was the poor man's palm, really, because palms were exotic and very expensive. Ferns could be found indigenously. Ferns were sometimes grown in the fireplace during the summer months.
SPEAKER_10: Ivies were draped across walls, over doorways and around window frames. And Victorians even designed furniture for their plants.
SPEAKER_06: One example was a palm table in which you would have a hole in the set. This would be a large dining table. There'd be a hole in the middle. And when the plant pot would be on the floor beneath the hole with the fronds of the leaves coming up through the hole. So that's a sort of almost as if it's sprouting from the table. All of this meant that Victorians had a remarkably intimate relationship with their plants.
SPEAKER_12: Penny Spark read a lot of these advice books for her research, and she noticed that people talked about their plants very lovingly, almost like they were sentient.
SPEAKER_06: A lot was written about the role of plants as being not just decorative, but also almost being like human beings. They were seen as companions, particularly to lonely people or bereaved people. They were seen to actually be almost substitute human beings, a bit like, I suppose, pets. I recently saw a tweet that said, Plants are the new pets and pets are the new kids.
SPEAKER_12: Which is, yeah, it's a good tweet. It's funny. It rings true. But I don't know how new any of it is. I actually think the Victorians were the first plant parents.
SPEAKER_10: The Victorian houseplant mania lasted into the early 20th century, but like all trends, it eventually cycled out of fashion.
SPEAKER_05: The way that I think of houseplants now is in waves almost, because I think a wave is a great way to think of like growing in popularity and then ebbing in popularity, but still there, like the water's still there. Because houseplants never entirely disappear.
SPEAKER_10: But they came pretty close in the early 20th century with the dawn of modernism.
SPEAKER_05: The reason we have a term like modernism to describe so many different types of art and design, whether it's the writing of Hemingway or the design of these homes, is because they do share these characteristics of like a rejection of that older way of doing things.
SPEAKER_12: And just as Hemingway famously rejected the ornate language of Victorian era novelists, modernist designers rejected the busy interiors of the Victorian home, which they described as overly domestic and feminine. No more horror vacui. The modernists were all about the vacui.
SPEAKER_10: The modernists, they're saying, we want open spaces. We want integration with the outdoor world. We want very few decorations at all.
SPEAKER_05: And that meant very few houseplants.
SPEAKER_06: So I think on the face of it, at least, the houseplant is really thrown out with domesticity by the modernists. It's seen as something belonging to an era they want to move away from. But at the same time, the houseplants hang on in there. The modernists didn't get rid of houseplants altogether, but they didn't want palms sprouting out of tables or ferns growing in the fireplace.
SPEAKER_12: In the perfect modernist home, everything was very spare.
SPEAKER_10: You just had a few pieces of simple furniture, maybe one painting on the wall. And if we do have houseplants, it's going to be like one sculptural houseplant in the corner, like not surrounded by any other houseplants and then also like placed as almost a beacon in a room, right?
SPEAKER_05: One of the few decorations that this space could echo off of.
SPEAKER_06: So each one has a spatial impact, whereas in the Victorian home, they're all mashed together into a jungle-like ensemble, if you like. So now it's using individual plants in much more strategic ways. Popular houseplants during this period included the famously sculptural Monstera deliciosa, the rubber plant with its thick, shiny leaves, and perhaps the most modernist plant of all, the cactus.
SPEAKER_06: Absolutely, because it's small, sculptural, and you would find rows of cacti in one shelf, say, and that would be all you'd find in of plant life in a modernist interior.
SPEAKER_10: But if modernism was a relative ebb in our relationship with indoor plants, by the 1960s and 70s, homes were once again, a wash in green. Well, the 70s was a period of great opulence of plants again in interiors. That was the era of the macrame hanging basket.
SPEAKER_06: I'm old enough to remember them and bringing jungle-like interiors back in again.
SPEAKER_12: And this wave in the 70s corresponded with a shift in interior design, a move away from the stark minimalism of the modern period and towards a looser style. The angular sofa gave way to the beanbag chair and houseplants once again, proliferated.
SPEAKER_05: So you have the trailing spider plant in a macrame hanger or just houseplants just hanging out like in a much more maximalist style that really did, I think in a lot of ways resembled the Victorian era.
SPEAKER_10: Like the Victorian era, the houseplant wave of the 60s and 70s was driven in part by a feeling that people had lost touch with nature. This was the dawn of the modern environmental movement and the back to land movement. People were longing to reconnect with the natural world.
SPEAKER_06: And the concept of biophilia comes along, which basically means that there's some sort of deep spiritual almost link between us and plants, because although we may not have lived within nature for two or three generations, we still have the memory of it. And that it can be evoked by surrounding ourselves with plants. In 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was published.
SPEAKER_10: The book argued that plants were capable of thought and feeling. The authors relied on a lot of new, agey pseudoscience, but they were tapping into the plant-worshipping zeitgeist.
SPEAKER_12: But the intensity of people's love for plants eventually became the object of ridicule and noticed a wave of houseplant media coverage during this decade, including three cover stories in New York magazine.
SPEAKER_05: And there's this picture on one of them. It's called The Secrets of the Plant People. And the picture on the cover is of people, of different silhouettes of people. And each of them has like a plant for a face. Like the plant has overtaken their minds. And the subtext here was that people's love of houseplants was going too far. They were obsessives.
SPEAKER_05: Then all of the photos, including the one on the cover, depict people who seem to have succumbed to a sort of plant mania. So these spaces in New York and the boroughs that are just filled with plants, like a guy whose attic is all orchids or a guy whose entire apartment is begonias. They call him a begonimaniac. And the art direction there is for you to think like, these people are crazy. This is what you don't want to be.
SPEAKER_10: The message here was that it was cool to be a person who had plants. But you didn't want to go too far. You didn't want to be a plant person. In the end, the hippie houseplant movement was fairly short-lived. In her book A Potted History, the historian Catherine Horwood writes that by the end of the 20th century, houseplants had become, quote,
SPEAKER_12: Just another burden. Yet one more thing to look after once work was finished, the house cleaned, the dog fed, and the children put to bed.
SPEAKER_10: But as we learned, our love of houseplants ebbs and flows. And that brings us to our current wave, which Ann argues began around 2010.
SPEAKER_05: That's when I remember seeing more and more succulents and houseplants just generally for sale in places like Target. A lot of different factors contributed to our contemporary houseplant boom. Many young people are living in small apartments and cities without a lot of outdoor space.
SPEAKER_10: And houseplants are an alternative to gardening.
SPEAKER_12: They've also just become cheaper and more widely available. You can buy them at boutique plant shops or in the checkout line at Urban Outfitters along with a tote bag that says hashtag Succulent Squad. Or on websites like The Sill, which will ship a plant right to your house. And there are plant swaps where collectors meet up to trade cuttings of their favorite varieties. And then, of course, there's Instagram, which has enabled people to document their collections and share plant care strategies on a massive scale.
SPEAKER_10: The popularity of houseplants on social media has supercharged the houseplant trend cycle. Varieties go in and out of fashion like sneakers, and some people spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars at rare houseplant auctions. So I think the first trend that we are going to be seeing going into 2022 is variegated antherium.
SPEAKER_05: OK, the next one is the variegated alocasia. As you can see from the picture, they are stunning.
SPEAKER_07: Around 2016, the it houseplant was pilea pepperomiodes or the Chinese money plant, which grows naturally in Yunnan.
SPEAKER_12: When pilea first got popular on Instagram, it was expensive and hard to find. People in the US were paying over $50 for a tiny little one. But then the industrial nurseries just started growing more of it and the prices dropped. And today pilea is everywhere. You can get a small one for five to ten dollars at just about any plant store you walk into.
SPEAKER_10: The growth in the houseplant industry has made collecting more affordable and accessible, but it also comes with costs. Rare plant species are sometimes harvested illegally from the wild and sold on eBay and Facebook. And when houseplants get popular, they become mass produced commodities. It takes a lot of water to grow them and plastic to keep them in pots and fossil fuels to ship them around the world. Also, you can have the next trendy plant as quickly and cheaply as possible.
SPEAKER_12: Anne Helen Peterson says that on its surface, this Instagram driven houseplant mania can feel like something totally new, like a clean break from the past. But she also sees echoes of the different eras of houseplant history in our current moment. Yeah, I think that this current moment really began with a more modernist understanding, especially with the embrace of the succulent.
SPEAKER_05: Like the succulent is a very modernist style. This was happening at the same time as the mid-century modern furniture renaissance.
SPEAKER_10: And so you might have one or two succulents that would look great next to your knockoff Eames chair. But something interesting has happened over the course of, I would say, the last 10, 12 years.
SPEAKER_05: I think that if you started with a single plant because you were like, that looks good, you know, I can handle a single plant. It looked good on Instagram. Those people have kind of caught the fever. And you're like, oh, now I have 15 plants. Is this too many plants?
SPEAKER_12: And pretty soon, your minimalist mid-century modern interior starts to look like a Victorian drawing room or the downtown apartment of a crazed begonia maniac. Which is what I have now. So instead of having, you know, I have some pieces that are structural parts of the decor and then a lot more that are just spreading, kind of like it's like an oozing virus.
SPEAKER_05: It's like more plants in as many directions as possible.
SPEAKER_12: Ann told me that she currently has like 40 houseplants, which I think is a lot. I've got like 11 and that feels like a lot. But I wanted to talk to someone who is more obsessed than either of us. Someone who has made houseplants a central part of his identity. Oh, hello. I'll let you in.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, thanks so much.
SPEAKER_12: Mikhail Buchele lives with his partner Paul in a cute little apartment in Oakland. When they first moved in, Mikhail really wanted to get a cat, but Paul was allergic. Once we can't get the cat, I was like, okay, let's do something else.
SPEAKER_02: And so he went out and got his very first houseplant. It was a ficus that he got from Trader Joe's.
SPEAKER_12: He loved it. And so he got another plant, this time a monstera, then another, and pretty soon he was hooked. This has just like became like a passion on the side.
SPEAKER_02: So it just grew from a single ficus to like now 100 plus plants indoors and in the balcony. So, yeah, a lot of plants.
SPEAKER_12: And those plants have a lot of fans. Mikhail has 25,000 Instagram followers who watch him water, fertilize, and take care of his plant babies. His signature move is that he dances with his plants using stop motion. I rotate them like quarter by quarter until they do a full twist.
SPEAKER_02: And then through power of edit, you could make them dance. To what song? It depends. There's the floor right spinning head right round and round.
SPEAKER_07: Spin my head right round, right round, when you go down, when you go down, down.
SPEAKER_12: On Instagram, Mikhail's apartment feels like a greenhouse club, but in person it's quiet and peaceful. Yeah, I usually in the morning I light an incense and just like look in the window and just adore the plants.
SPEAKER_02: What do you like about them? What emotions do they give you?
SPEAKER_12: Oh, gosh. It reminds me of my childhood growing up in the Philippines.
SPEAKER_02: I have a little farm, so a little like growing up in a little country. So it's fun to like have plants around you again. Kind of like reminds me of my childhood memories.
SPEAKER_12: Some of Mikhail's plants are actually native to the Philippines. He says that when he FaceTimes with his grandma, she'll recognize plants inside of his apartment.
SPEAKER_02: So I collected some of them just to like honor my country, like this biggest allocation I have. That is from our province of Bicol, which is in the east side of the Philippines. So I collect like small things that reminds me of home.
SPEAKER_12: Mikhail says that knowing a houseplant's context in the wild is important to him as a collector. It can help him understand what the plant needs and how to take care of it. But it also reminds him of the long journey that that plant took to end up in his apartment. Since the early days of European colonization, houseplants have become commodities sold on a global marketplace. And at this point, there's a certain placelessness to them. Today, you might encounter the same houseplant at a coffee shop in Tokyo or a hotel in Mexico City or more likely on Instagram. And then you can go online and order that same plant for yourself and it will appear on your doorstep in a couple of days. Buying houseplants has gotten so easy that you can lose track of the fact that these objects of interior design are also living organisms from a particular place. And each one has a history.
SPEAKER_10: After the break, what's better for your plants? Flo Rida or bac cantatas? Stay with us. The IRC has gone on within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls. Ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Their generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of super foods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A, and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. Chances are you're listening to 99% invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are. It's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile dot com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile dot com. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. With member areas, you can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses or newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades. Now you can create pro level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share your new blogs or videos on social media automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it to. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to Squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or domain. So we're back with our engineer, Martin Gonzalez. Hey, Martin. Hey, Robin. What's up? And we're here to talk about plants and music.
SPEAKER_09: I wanted to start off by playing you some of my favorite plant related music. This amazing record called Plantasia by Mort Garson. It's from 1976, right in the middle of the second big house plant boom, and it came free with purchases at Mother Earth Plant Store in Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_10: I mean, I would definitely expect that coming from a place called Mother Earth, that kind of spacey, new agey, psychedelic kind of music. But I guess not necessarily what I'd associate with plants. Totally. Like everyone's heard that classical music is supposed to help plants grow, and it feels kind of intuitively true. Right.
SPEAKER_09: You know, it's music that smart people listen to, so it's got to be like scientifically superior. Right. Sure. So I looked into it to see if it was a real thing. And the first person to make this claim was an Indian scientist in the early 1900s named Jagdish Chandra Bose. He made some major discoveries in how electricity works in plants and measured how they reacted to stimulus. But he took those discoveries into some pretty wild territory. He claimed that plants actually have thoughts and feelings and, of course, musical preferences.
SPEAKER_10: But like turn of the 20th century is way earlier than I thought for that kind of like, you know, woo woo notion.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it was still a fringy idea for most of the 20th century until The Secret Life of Plants, which we referenced in the main story. It was a book that came out in 1973 and adapted a few years later into a movie. It's really more of a vibe than a documentary. There's long stretches of time-lapse photography of plants growing and a beautiful Stevie Wonder soundtrack. Mainly, though, it's full of pseudoscientific experiments and anecdotal evidence to support some, shall we say, dubious claims about plant consciousness. For example, it heavily features the work of Cleve Baxter. Before studying plants, he was a CIA interrogator and one of the foremost polygraph experts in his day. He was working late one night and wondered what kind of lie detector readings his office plant would give. He watered it and... It went into sort of a wild excitation very similar to the first part of a human taking a polygraph test.
SPEAKER_09: That made him curious about how a plant might react to a threat, and he decided he would light one of its leaves on fire. He didn't have any matches and was thinking about going to the other room to grab some. But before he even got up, something unexpected happened. The tracing just went right off the top of the page. And the only thing that occurred at that time, no lighting of a match, nothing else, merely the imagery of fire.
SPEAKER_04: Wait, so he thought that the plant could read his mind thinking about fire?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that is exactly what he's saying. The plants have ESP.
SPEAKER_09: And he goes on to claim that plants get distressed at the harm of any living being, which he tries to prove by killing a bunch of shrimp in front of plants to see if they get upset.
SPEAKER_08: At some undetermined moment, chosen by a randomizer, these brine shrimp will fall to their deaths in boiling water.
SPEAKER_10: This is demented.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, he also has a researcher commit plant murder by ripping up one plant in front of another one. In some mysterious way, the plant which is attached to the instrument is able to feel the mutilation of its comrade.
SPEAKER_00: Hours later, the technicians are asked to return to the scene of the crime. The evidence is clear. The remaining plant has correctly identified the assailant.
SPEAKER_10: Wow. So what they're saying is, is like, there could be a plant in a room, the scene of a crime, like a murder can happen, and the plant would be a witness to it and could pinpoint who did the murder. That's a stunning. I am surprised I haven't seen that on Law & Order at this point.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and like, you know, as soon as you hear you go, that's a little too far. And this is kind of a recurring theme. The results of the experiments sound too good to be true, and they end up being difficult or impossible to replicate. There's frequently methodology issues and experimenter bias. It's really easy to selectively interpret this polygraph data to fit whatever theory you've cooked up. So going back to the idea that classical music helps plants grow, around the same time as Secret Life of Plants, this pianist named Dorothy Ritalik conducted these experiments about plants and music. Now, it's important to note, she wasn't a botanist, just an undergrad music student fulfilling a biology requirement. Oh, good. But her experiments got tons of media coverage because they were very attention-grabby. For example, here's a clip from a 1977 episode of In Search Of hosted by none other than Leonard Nimoy.
SPEAKER_03: Mrs. Ritalik theorized that in subtle ways, plants might share her sensitivity to sound. Harsh music had always bothered Mrs. Ritalik. Could it be that plants also preferred one sound to another?
SPEAKER_09: She set up an experiment with two groups of plants in separate soundproof chambers. Semi-classical music was played into one. Hard rock into the other.
SPEAKER_03: In the chamber with soft music, the plants leaned toward the speaker, seeming to draw strength from the melodious sounds. In the chamber with rock music, the plants shrank away and eventually died.
SPEAKER_09: And in a coincidence no one could have guessed, the music that helps plants grow just so happens to be the kind of music that she likes. What a shock. And like the dead giveaway is that in her book about these sites, she says that the withered plants reminded her of the burnouts at rock festivals, and she also volunteers to use her research in anti-drug PSAs. Oh my goodness, okay. Now, there is plenty of evidence that plants do react to sound. Experiments have proven that they'll grow toward a speaker that's playing the sound of running water, or release toxins when they hear the sound of a caterpillar chomping on leaves. But whenever other researchers have tried to replicate this kind of music experiment though, generally what they've found is that plants don't have any preference for a specific kind of music. What they like is moving air as opposed to stagnant air, so it's just the waves of the sound rather than the content of it. And in fact when Mythbusters tried it out, their heavy metal plants outperformed the classical music ones. That's interesting.
SPEAKER_09: So we've been talking a lot about what sounds plants like, but what about the sounds plants can make? Okay. So for me the coolest part of Secret Life of Plants is this artist named John Lifton who did a project where he hooked plants up to synthesizers. And along the same lines I've got this device called a Plant Wave. It turns your houseplants into little Brian Enos.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. So how does that end up working?
SPEAKER_09: It's actually pretty similar to the method that Cleve Baxter used. Basically you attach electrical sensors to your plant and it reads the fluctuating voltages. But instead of using that data to fit Kooky theories, the Plant Wave maps it onto soothing flutes and tinkles and bloops. And as the plant photosynthesizes, the sound it produces changes over time. So I hooked it up to my aloe and I let it get just a little drier than usually you would. And it just was only putting out these couple sparse, lonely notes. So I watered it and I came back 12 hours later and I heard all these rich harmonies. Wow. That's so cool. So when Emma interviewed Mikhail for this story, we also brought along the Plant Wave and recorded his monstera to see what it would sound like. We thought it sounded so cool that we actually ended up using it in the story to score the part about 1970s plant culture. Wow. So did you try other plants besides the monstera? I mean, do different plants sound different?
SPEAKER_09: Well, you know, it's kind of the anthropomorphic view where it's not like a palm tree sounds like a surf guitar and a cactus sounds like mariachi. If only. It's really more of a collaboration. You choose the sound and scale and the plant picks the notes and the rhythms. I see. And what I like about this device is that in the marketing, they go out of their way to not make any wild scientific claims. They say it's just a pleasing way to create music together with your plants and help you feel closer to them. It's kind of like Mikhail dancing with his plants to make TikToks. Spending more time with them makes you better tuned into their needs. And that'll help them grow much more than blasting violin concertos at them. Right. Right.
SPEAKER_10: You're not inflicting your musical taste on them and insisting that it makes them better plants.
SPEAKER_09: In the end, the music that we made together came out closer to Plantasia than it did to Bach.
SPEAKER_10: Right. So but I really like the plant music that you made. So let's play some more of that and we'll just like do the credits over that. OK. Yeah. So this is an oregano plant that I grew from a clipping I got from my dad.
SPEAKER_10: Ninety nine percent of visible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald and Anne Helen Peterson mix and tech production by Martin Gonzalez music by a director of sound Swan real with assistance from Michael's Monstera and Martine's Aloe and Oregano. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kirk Colstead is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivien Lay, Chris Peroube, Christopher Johnson, Loshma Dawn, Sophia Klatsker, Jason De Leon, Joe Rosenberg, Intern Sarah Bake and me Roman Mars. Big thanks this week to Anne Helen Peterson. Today's episode was inspired by Anne's houseplant essay on her sub stack culture study. It's a great read and you should totally check it out. Also Penny Sparks book about houseplant history is called Nature Inside. It is also great. And thank you to Joe Patitucci and Data Garden for sending us a plant wave so that our plants could make sounds. You find links to all those things on our Web site. Ninety nine percent of visible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 Pi org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to others to church shows I love as well as every past episode of 99 Pi at 99 Pi dot org.
SPEAKER_08: Dr. Hashimoto, managing director and chief of research for the Fuji electronic industries, has constructed special instruments which translate the electrical output of plants into modulated sounds, giving voice to a cactus. And serious.
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