Stevie Wonder became blind just after birth, so he never saw a plant or a flower, yet in 1979 he recorded Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants”, a whole album that explored human connection to them. The subject of that connection was not just your average, everyday relations with plants, but instead the idea of them as sentient beings and our ability to perceive them as such. Many critics at the time found this choice of subject for Stevie Wonder difficult to understand, but how can that be; when a person is missing one of their senses, there is evidence to suggest that not only improvements in the other senses occur, but that the brain has a total rewiring, taking the unused parts and putting them to work in different ways. So perhaps not that surprising, but deeply fascinating, that Stevie Wonder, a spiritual man, at the height of his career, chose to focus on something that is rarely considered by the majority of sighted people, or at least by those who record Western culture.
The album was written by Stevie Wonder as a soundtrack to the documentary The Secret Life of Plants, a film based on the book of the same name by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published in 1973. The latter describes the plants adapting to human wishes, their response to music, their curative power, and their ability to communicate with us. The film featuring time-lapse footage of plants growing, seen here a long time before we saw it in David Attenborough’s Private Life of Plants, was accompanied by Wonder’s interpretative score. It is reported that to achieve this he first recorded the film’s producer describing each scene in detail, the visuals that were happening, over the duration of time they occurred. This was then used as a template for him to build his music upon. In addition to the title track, “Come Back as a Flower”, “Power Flower”, “Venus’ Flytrap and the Bug”, “Black Orchid” and “Tree” were names of some of the others.
Wonder himself later acknowledged the album as experimental, stating “[I liked] challenging myself with all the things that entered my mind from the Venus’s Flytrap to Earth’s creation to coming back as a flower.” Thereby confirming this album to not only be a beautiful and emotional musical score but a window into his unique internal plant world.
The Secret Life Of Plants – Lyrics
I can’t conceive the nucleus of all
Begins inside a tiny seed
And what we think as insignificant
Provides the purest air we breathe
But who am I to doubt or question the inevitable being
For these are but a few discoveries
We find inside the Secret Life of Plants
A species smaller than the eye can see
Or larger than most living things
And yet we take from it without consent
Our shelter, food, habilment
But who am I to doubt or question the inevitable being
For these are but a few discoveries
We find inside the Secret Life of Plants
But far too many give them in return
A stomp, cut, drown, or burn
As is they’re nothing
But if you ask yourself where would you be
Without them you will find you would not
And some believe antennas are their leaves
That spans beyond our galaxy
They’ve been, they are and probably will be
Who are the mediocrity
But who am I to doubt or question the inevitable being
For these are but a few discoveries
We find inside the Secret Life of Plants
For these are but a few discoveries
We find inside the Secret Life of Plants