Each song on the 1970 album Music to Grow Plants starts out with a high-pitched whistling sound. These are, according to the liner notes, a sound “which acts upon plant growth patterns.” The notes have been “electronically embedded” into the record, which should mean, according to the description, that they are inaudible to humans.
However, the notes caution “you may at times hear certain high frequency tones that could not be hidden completely.”Those sounds are jarring, to say the least, especially when coupled with the plant-growing music, which has a gentle, ’60s cocktail-party sort of feel to it.
It’s almost charming to picture the album’s creator and cover star, retired dentist turned horticulture expert Dr. George Milstein, serenading his plants with this music for 45 minutes a day—a duration he recommended “to keep their pores open longer and wider, allowing a greater exchange with the air around them.” This regimen, to his mind, would help them grow.
Milstein was a firm believer in the science of sound when it came to his plants. A booklet enclosed with the record outlines his theory: “Just as all plant growth and flower development is stimulated by light vibrations, so it is logical to assume that the vibrations of sounds can also exert a beneficial influence on the horticulture of plants.”
As the president of the New York Horticultural Society, Milstein knew his way around a leaf. He was an expert in growing bromeliads—a variety of tropical plants—indoors, something that wasn’t easy to do. “I don’t want to sound immodest,” he told the New York Times in 1970, “but I am the authority on growing bromeliads in the home. They used to say it couldn’t be done.” Like all great pioneers before him, Milstein ignored the impossible. His home was covered in these impossible bromeliads, and all 300 of them were thriving, he insisted, because of his musical technique.
He claimed he tested his theories scientifically, under laboratory conditions, and found that plants “hearing” some sweet sounds grew faster than those not rocking out with their calyx out. “One plant bloomed in only six months when it ordinarily takes two years,” he said.
For all of his enthusiasm, plants were not always his main gig. Milstein had been a dentist for over 30 years when a bad hip forced him into retirement. Two plants gifted to him in 1958 by a patient started him down the path of the plant life. His retirement was just what he needed to move from hobbyist to plant-music professional.
Milstein wasn’t the first to suggest a link between music and plant growth, of course, and he wouldn’t be the last. Early 1900s studies by Bengali scientist Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose posited that music had an effect on plants. His work included the creation of the crescograph, an instrument used to measure plant growth and figure out what factors helped it. Bose believed that plant growth was not the only thing at stake, but a plant’s emotional well-being….
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