THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS Exclusive

The documentary ”The Secret Life of Plants”, directed by Walon Green, was adapted from the 1973 book “The Secret Life of Plants” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. The book explored controversial and often pseudoscientific theories, suggesting that plants might exhibit emotional responses, even consciousness, drawing on figures such as Cleve Backster and the work of botanists like Jagadish Chandra Bose.

Much of the most insightful writing on the film and its soundtrack comes from Adam White, author of Motown: The Sound of Young America (with Barney Ales), who has written about music, the music industry, and Motown for more than 40 years. A former editor-in-chief of Billboard, co-author (with Fred Bronson) of The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, and a Grammy-nominated writer whose work has appeared at the Library of Congress and even been sampled by Public Enemy, White has followed Stevie Wonder’s career closely. “Motown: The Sound of Young America” has been published in seven languages and remains in print. In an essay titled “Stevie’s ‘experimental’ soundtrack reconsidered,” White revisited Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants.
2025


The photographer asked Stevie Wonder to sit at the piano. It was next to a large potted plant in Motown Records’ headquarters on Sunset Boulevard. Obligingly, he did so, then pretended to bite one of its leaves. “Hey, that’d be a good caption,” he declared to his Los Angeles Times interviewer. “‘Stevie Wonder doesn’t only sing about plants, he eats them.’” He added, “If Plants doesn’t sell as well as Motown expects, I might also have to eat the album.”

The figurative meal would have been filling. Motown shipped 1.2 million units of “Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants” for its U.S. release on October 30, 1979. According to president Jay Lasker, the company eventually took back 550,000 copies, unsold.

That Wonder’s idiosyncratic soundtrack closed out his most accomplished, inspiring decade as a disappointment is the accepted wisdom. And yet, 25 years after the double album’s release, the musician singled it out as one of his quintessential works. “I just think that if you have a love for music,” he told Billboard’s Gail Mitchell, “you cannot limit yourself to any particular kind of music.” It was, he added, “an experimental project with me scoring and doing other things I like: challenging myself with all the things that entered my mind from the Venus’ flytrap to Earth’s creation to coming back as a flower.”




Play: The Secret Life of Plants (1979)

A younger generation appears to agree - those who grew up able to order à la carte from Wonder’s entire music menu, chosen from a distance rather than at the moment of release. Now that’s a feast. The names of those influenced by Life of Plants can surprise, from Solange Knowles to Prefab Sprout’s Paddy McAloon. “I think through the evolution of music that really enriched me during this time - whether it be Stevie Wonder’s Secret Life of Plants or it be Steve Reich or it be Alice Coltrane - these are artists who have used repetition in those projects to really reinforce their frequencies,” Knowles told The Atlantic. “I can remember feeling liberated enough to stretch myself lyrically,” McAloon recalled to Mojo in 2004. “On ‘Outside My Window,’ you can hear echoes of ‘Isn’t She Lovely,’ but he’s singing to petunias rather than a baby…of course, it’s Stevie Wonder singing them, and when a voice has such musicality to it, it’s way more than the sum of its parts.”

India Arie was sufficiently inspired that she named her second album, Voyage to India, after a track on the Wonder work. The Roots’ Amir “Questlove” Thompson told Pitchfork that the music “marked a special awakening moment for me…I was a little weirded out that these weren’t songs. I often wondered, ‘Why would you take such a risk?’ Now, I live with that question.” At a New York University course on Wonder taught by Motown catalogue maestro Harry Weinger, Questlove said, “I used to just sit and imagine [the film], even without any video.” The album was also his first headphone experience, at the age of eight.





Pitchfork later published perhaps the most thorough musical assessment of Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants. Wonder, writer Andy Beta asserted in 2019, “literally branched out…exploring intuitively and fearlessly in a manner that few artists have ever managed to do in the history of pop music.” Behind the scenes, however, there were countless stories about Wonder’s involvement with the film and Motown’s experience with the result—tales of pioneering sound and perfume, of perpetual delays and top-hatted concerts, and, of course, of plants.

The movie was based on the Tompkins and Bird bestseller, described as an account of “the physical, emotional, and spiritual relations between plants and man.” It was announced in the Hollywood trade press in 1974 with producer Michael Braun and director Walon Green. Braun is said to have approached Wonder in 1975 about creating the soundtrack, and evidence suggests the Motown superstar was working on tracks such as “A Seed’s A Star” in the autumn of 1977 at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios.




The Secret Life of Plants. 1978. USA. Directed by Walon Green. Courtesy Paramount Pictures and Richard Lowenberg

According to former Sigma staffer Arthur Stoppe, Wonder was so attuned to his surroundings that when he handed a cassette to an engineer for playback, he could identify the model number of the tape machine by the sound its door made. Later, Wonder bought a Sony PCM-1600 digital recorder for the project, making Life of Plants one of the industry’s first digitally recorded albums.

Meanwhile, Braun and Green faced cinematic hurdles, including Paramount Pictures’ lack of enthusiasm. Delays mounted, and Wonder reworked instrumental tracks into vocals. Motown previewed extracts at Cannes in January 1979, but the clock kept ticking. To herald the album’s arrival, Motown UK’s David Hughes wrote to retailers that he had planned to send sunflower seeds - then did so anyway, encouraging them to plant and wait. “Thank you for your patience,” he concluded.

Internal tensions followed. Barney Ales advised cutting the project to a single album. “There’s only one good song in there,” he recalled saying. The advice was ignored. “They were banking everything on the motion picture. And that was horrible.”

When an October release was finally set, other strategies emerged. Wonder’s controversial endorsement of TDK blank tape raised his profile, with Life of Plants music featured in advertisements. Packaging posed its own challenges: an embossed, Braille-inscribed, three-panel foldout, scented with gardenia in early pressings - abandoned in the UK after the aroma reportedly melted the vinyl.

To Motown’s relief, Wonder supported the album with a major publicity push, including a launch at New York’s botanical gardens. In a widely circulated Associated Press interview, he explained his use of technology to capture and manipulate natural sounds. “No one should deny an artist a chance to express what his experiences are,” he said. “If I cannot grow and be expressive of my inner self, there is no need for me to be in the world of music.”

The charts responded: “Send One Your Love” and the album both reached the Billboard Top 5, supported by a December tour that included New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. The shows were demanding, but not without commercial awareness. After an orchestral Life of Plants set, Wonder returned as Little Stevie Wonder, complete with period costume, to perform “Fingertips – Pt. 2.” It was, as White wrote in Billboard, “a good-humoured acknowledgement of his Motown past.”





Financially, the album fell short of Motown’s hopes. Creatively and spiritually, its afterlife has been far richer. “It seems a little unfair that this was so badly received when it came out,” said McAloon. “Whenever I see this album in a charity shop, I can’t not buy it…I’m continually handing them out to people.”

The journey continues.




Beta, A. (2019) Stevie Wonder: Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants. Pitchfork. Available at: https://pitchfork.com (Accessed: 5 October 2025).
Campbell, M. (1979) ‘Interview with Stevie Wonder on The Secret Life of Plants’, Associated Press, October.
Green, W. (Director) (1979) The Secret Life of Plants [Documentary film]. USA: Michael Braun Productions.
Tompkins, P. and Bird, C. (1973) The Secret Life of Plants. New York: Harper & Row.
White, A. (n.d.) ‘Stevie’s “experimental” soundtrack reconsidered’, Motown: The Sound of Young America. Available at: https://motown.blog (Accessed: 5 October 2025).
Wonder, S. (1979) Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants [Album]. Motown Records.