99% Invisible - 499- Say Aloe to My Little Frond

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Houseplants are having a moment right now. In 2020, 66% of people in the US owned at least one plant, and sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Meanwhile, Instagram accounts like House Plant Club have a million followers. Over the past decade there has been a steady stream of think pieces offering explanations for the emergence of this new obsession. But while millennials may have perfected the art of plant parenting, this is not the first time people have gotten completely obsessed with houseplants. Journalist Anne Helen Petersen digs into the history of domesticated plants in a series of articles on her Substack, Culture Study, and joins us to talk about what she's found.Say Aloe to My Little Frond

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. That is a bold choice, Anne Helen Peterson, and I am here for it. If you don't people are always like, oh, but all of his films are so violent, and the Age of Innocence is an emotionally violent movie. So it's just operating in a different register. It's the blind, I love it so much. The Age of Innocence looks really different from any of Scorsese's other films. 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. It's the kind of film that you watch to get lost in the rose gardens, in the frilly dresses, in the wallpaper drawing rooms. But on this particular rewatch, and noticed something else about the set design that really stood out, the houses were packed to the gills with plants. I was so fascinated by just how prevalent houseplants were throughout the entire film, and actually sort of as an really important

backdrop for several pivotal scenes. Throughout the movie, the characters wander between giant ferns and palms. The kinds of plants that you might find in a swankey buti-co-tail today. In fact, when I see the plants in the age of innocence, they look almost inachronistic to me. Like, you can imagine the production designer buying them at lows. Well, I think oftentimes people don't think that anyone other than us had houseplants somehow, right? There's just this assumption that somehow houseplants are a creation of contemporary society, contemporary decorating, you know, like something that is as new as IKEA say.

And I mean, it's true that houseplants are having a moment right now. In 2020, 66% of people in the US owned at least one houseplant, and plant cells 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 bloom in historical perspective. Because while millennials may have perfected the art of plant parenting, and is here to tell you this is not the first time people have gotten completely obsessed with houseplants. 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.

If you think about it, the entire idea of the house plant 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. Which 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? 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 1,000 BC. But the rise of the global house plant economy that we are familiar with today really begins during the age of European imperialism.

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 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 planets. 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. Here's interior design historian Penny Spark and Kingston University in London. The plant hunters themselves were sort of intrepid people, often 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 more exotic, the better. They put them in boxes and transported them over many months long voyages back to the cold

climate of Europe. 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. And they would just die on the way, always. People in this period believe 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. And so there were sorts of experiments we had to take into trying find ways of preserving the plants.

And one of the most successful was something called a Bordian case designed by somebody called the Sanul Ward. The Bordian case was like a small portable greenhouse. The plants were sealed off from the outside world and got their water to the cycle of evaporation and condensation. It was in closed case that actually allowed moist just to go back into the plant and keep it alive. And essentially what it did was create this moist environment inside that approximated a jungle.

In 1833, two wardeen 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 Warty encase became a key tool for colonial plant traders, 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. 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. I think about a palm arriving. If all you've ever experienced really in terms of trees is deciduous trees and evergreen

trees, 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. 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, 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 house plants first step in their journey out of the jungle. The next step brought them closer to the home itself. The European aristocracy grew so enchanted with tropical exotics that they wanted greenhouse as of their own, 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. Then in the middle of the 19th century, England got rid of a really high tax on glass.

And that made conservatories available to a much wider swath of the population. So, whereas the wealthiest states, country estates, would have greenhouses and conservatories on the land, middle-class suburban home would want its own little conservatory. And increasingly, these conservatars were attached to houses. They weren't situated at the greenhouse at the back of the gov, and they were actually attached. This was all happening at the dawn of urbanization and industrialization in Europe, 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, where a generation of people had left the land and left living within nature and gone into the urban setting. They realized something was missing. So they had a huge loss, sense of loss. And these conservatories were a way to try to deal with that loss and bring nature back into people's lives. On a traditional country estate,

the Gardiner 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. And the woman is the person left at home to do nurturing of children and but also of plants. 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. Indoor plants got more and more popular in this period until they eventually outgrew the conservatory and moved inside the house. Yes, it is, it's 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 parlour. You can construct so many containers

or shelving systems or window boxes, hanging baskets. There was a whole industry of containers really. 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. The Victorians famously had and everything but the kitchen sink approach to interior design. There's a phrase I love that sometimes used to describe the aesthetics from this period.

Horror Vacuay, which means the fear of empty space. You know, we use the word clutter a lot about these engineers. I don't like things that are being cluttered. I think they were just very, very full, full of furniture, full of date decorations, full of plants, full of everything. Victorians brought the unruly jungle inside and filled up their homes with many of the same varieties of houseplants that we have today. The fern was incredibly popular, and of course the palms.

So the palm and the fern were 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 indigently. Ferns were sometimes grown in the fireplace during the summer months. Ivees were draped across walls, over doorways and around window frames, and the Victorian's even designed furniture for their plants. One example was a palm table, in which you would have a hole in the set. This would be a large dining table.

There would 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 it's as if it's sprouting from the table. All of this meant that Victorians had a remarkably intimate relationship with their plants. 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. 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, but like I suppose pets. I recently saw a tweet that said, plants are the new pets and pets are the new kids, which, yeah, that'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. The Victorian houseplant mania lasted into the early 20th century, but like all trends,

it eventually cycled at a fashion. The way that I think of houseplants now is in waves, almost because I think a wave is a great way to think of growing in popularity and then ebbing in popularity, but still there, like the water still there, because houseplants never entirely disappear. But they came pretty close in the early 20th century with the dawn of modernism. 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 a rejection of that older way of doing things. 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, vacu-y. The modernists were all about the vacu-y. The modernists, they're saying, we want. The modernists are saying we want open spaces. We want integration with the outdoor world. We want very few decorations at all. And that meant very few houseplants. So I think on the face of it at least, the house plant is really thrown out

with domesticity by the modernist. It's seen as something belonging to an era they want to move away from. But at the same time, the house plants hang on in there. The modernists didn't get rid of house plants altogether, but they didn't want palms sprouting out of tables or ferns growing in the fireplace. In the perfect modernist home, everything was very spare. 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 plow's plants, and then also like placed as almost a beacon in a room, right? One of the few decorations that the space could echo off of. So each one has a spatial impact, whereas in the Victorian home it's, they're all mushed together into a jungle-like, ensemble, if you like. So now it's using individual plants

in much more strategic ways. Popular house plants 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. 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 of plant life in a modernist interior. But if modernism was a relative em in our relationship with indoor plants, by the 1960s and 70s, homes were once again washed in green. Well, the 70s was a period of great opulence of plants again in interiors. That was the era of the Mac from a hanging basket.

I'm old enough to remember them. And bringing jungle-like interiors back in again. 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 beanback chair and houseplants once again, proliferated.

So you have the trailing spider plant in a macrame hanger, or just houseplants just hanging out in a much more maximalist style that really did. I think it a lot of ways resembled the Victorian era. 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.

And the concept of biofilia 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. The book argued that plants were capable of thought and feeling. The authors relied on a lot of new AG pseudoscience, but they were tapping into the plant worshipping zeitgeist.

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. And there's this picture in 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 subjects here was that people's love of houseplants was going too far. They were obsessives.

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 burrows that are just filled with plants, like a guy whose attic is all orchids, or a guy whose entire apartment is begonias, Nikolam, a begonim maniac. And the art direction there is for you to think like, these people are crazy. This is what you don't want to be. 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, Apotted History, the historian Catherine Horwood writes that, by the end of the 20th century, houseplants had become, quote, 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.

But as we learned, our love of houseplants, ebbs and flows, and that brings us to our current wave, which Anne argues began around 2010. 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, and houseplants are an alternative to gardening. 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 plants swaps where collectors meet up to trade cuttings of their favorite varieties. And then of course, there is Instagram, which has enabled people to document their collections and share plant care strategies on a massive scale. 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 and theorem. Okay, the next one is the variegated allocation. As you can see from the picture, they are stunning. Around 2016, the It house plant was Pilea pepperon miyoi-dies, or the Chinese money plant, which grows naturally in Yunnan. 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 nursery has just started growing more of it,

and the prices dropped, and today Pilea is everywhere. a tiny little one. But then, the industrial nursery has just started growing more of it, and the prices dropped, and today, Pylea is everywhere. You can get a small one for $5-10 at just about any plant store you walk into. The growth in the house plant 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 house plants 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. 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. Like the succulent is a very modernist style. This was happening at the same time as the mid-century modern furniture Renaissance. 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.

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 I'm like, oh, now I have 15 plants. Is this too many plants? And pretty soon, your minimalist mid-century modern interior

starts to look like a Victorian drawing room, or the downtown apartment of a crazed Bagonia 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. It's like more plants in as many directions as possible. And 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, uh, what are you in? Okay, thanks so much. Mikhail Bucho lives with his partner, Paul,

and 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. And so he went out and got his very first house plan. It was a fight guess that he got from Trader Joe's.

He loved it. And so he got another plant this time, Oman Stera, then another and pretty soon he was hooked. This has just like became like a passion on the side. So it just grew from a single fight us to like now a hundred plus of plants indoors and in the balcony. So yeah a lot of plants 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 This 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, and then through power of edit, you could make them dance. To what song? Um, it depends. There's the fluoride spinning head right around and around. I'm spinning my head right, right, right, right, right. When you go down, when you go down, down. It's like a house with my bag of house.

On Instagram, Maca house 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 into the window and just adore the plants. What do you like about them or like what emotions do they give you? Oh gosh, it reminds me of my childhood growing up in the Philippines. growing up in the Philippines. 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. Some of MacIllas plants are actually

needed to the Philippines. He says that when he facetimes with his grandma she'll recognize plants inside of his apartment. So I collected some of them just to like, honor my country like this biggest allocation I have. That is from our province of Beekle, which is in the east side of the Philippines. So I collect like small things that reminds me of home. Mikael says that knowing a house plant'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 commodity 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 house plants 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. After the break, what's better for your plants? Flow righte or buck cantadas. Stay with us. So we're back with our engineer, Martín González. Hey, Martín. Hey, everyone, what's up?

And we're here to talk about plants and music. I wanted to start off by playing you some of my favorite plant-related music. This amazing record called Plantasia by Mork Garcin. It's from 1976, right in the middle of the second big houseplant boom and it came free with purchases at Mother Earth plant store in Los Angeles. I mean, I would definitely expect that coming from a place called Mother Earth, that kind of spacey new AG psychedelic, you know, kind of music, but I guess it's 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. 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 needs a 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. But like turn of the 20th century is way earlier than I thought for that kind of like, you know,

woo-woo notion. 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. ["Movey"]

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 pseudo-scientific 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 the wild excitation very similar to the first part of a human taking a polygraph test. 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 you 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, nearly the imagery of fire. Wait, so he thought that the plant could read his mind thinking about fire? Yeah, that is exactly what he's saying. The plants have ESP, 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. At some undetermined moment chosen by a randomizer, these brine shrimp will fall to their deaths in boiling water.

This is demented. 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 comrades. 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. Wow. So what they're saying is, it's like, there could be a plant in a room that's seen of a crime, like a murk 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 and order at this point.

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 Ritalic conducted these experiments

about plants and music. Now, it's important to note, she was't a botanist, just an undergrads music student fulfilling a biology requirement. 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 Insertreve hosted by none other than Leonard Nimoy. Mrs. Ritalic theorized that in subtle ways, plants might share her sensitivity to sound. Harsh music had always bothered Mrs. Ritalic. Could it be that plants also preferred one sound to another?

She set up an experiment with two groups of plants in separate soundproof chambers. Semiclassical music was played into one. Hard rock into the other. of plants in separate soundproof chambers. And in a coincidence no one could have guessed 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 giveaways that in her book about these says, she says that the withered plants reminded her of the burnouts at rock festivals and she also volunteers to use her research in antidrug

PSAs. Oh my goodness, okay. Now there is plenty of evidence that plans do react to sound. Experiments have proven that they'll grow towards a speaker that's playing the sound of running water, or release toxins when they hear the sound of a caterpillar chomping on the leaves. But whenever other researchers have tried to replicate this kind of music experiment, though, generally, what they 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 outperform the classical music ones. That's interesting. So we've been talking a lot about what sounds plants like, but what about the sounds plants can make? So for me, the coolest part of Secret Life of Plants is this artist named John Lichten,

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 house plants into little Brian E. Nose. Yeah. So how does that end up working? It's actually pretty similar to the method that cleave backstriused. Basically, you attach electrical sensors to your plant and it reads the fluctuating voltages. But instead of using that data to fit cookie theories, the plan 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 was just only putting out these couple sparse, lonely notes. I watered it and I came back 12 hours later and I heard all these rich harmonies. I heard all these rich harmonies. Oh, that's so cool. So when Emmett interviewed Mikael for this story, we also brought along a plant wave and

recorded his monstera to see what it would sound like. And 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 beside the Monstera? I mean, do different plants sound different? 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 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 Mikael 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. You're not inflicting your musical tastes on them and insisting that it makes them better plants. And in the end, the music that we made together came out closer to plantasia than it did to Bach.

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. Okay, yeah. So this is an oregano plant that I grew from a clipping I got from my dad. 99% of visible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald and Anne Helen Peterson, mixed in tech production by Martin Gonzales, music by a director of sound Swan Rial with assistance from Mikael's Monstera and Martins, Allo and Oregano. Tulenihal is the executive producer, Kirk Cole's state is our digital writer.

The rest of the team includes Vivian Leigh, Chris Baroubaix, Christopher Johnson, Lashmadan, 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 Spark's book about houseplant history is called Nature Inside. It's also great. And thank you to Joe Patatucci and Data Garden for sending us a plant wave so that our plants could make sounds.

You can find links to all those things on our website. 99% 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 99PI org. We're on Instagram and write it too. You can find links to others to your shows I love,

as well as every past episode of 99PI. at 99PI.org. 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 to a cactus.