LISTEN – Plantasia in the Gardens
September 2nd 2026 | Allan Gardens | 6 PM – 9 PM | RSVP Required | Pay What You Can (Suggested $10)
Fifty Years of Mother Earth’s Plantasia
Fifty years after Mother Earth’s Plantasia first invited listeners to imagine music made for plants, Polaris is bringing the album back into the garden.
In celebration of the 2026 Polaris Festival, presented by SiriusXM Canada, Polaris brings to you Plantasia in the Gardens, an intimate listening experience marking the 50th anniversary of Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia.
Presented in partnership with Sacred Bones Records and Friends of Allan Gardens, the event brings Garson’s cult electronic album into the plant-filled environment of Allan Gardens for an evening of vinyl playback, deep listening, and conversation.
Released in 1976, Mother Earth’s Plantasia has spent five decades growing into something far bigger than its unusual origins. Created as “warm earth music for plants and the people who love them,” the album’s playful synthesizers, strange melodies, and imagined relationship between technology and plant life have continued to find new audiences across generations.
Now, 50 years later, Plantasia returns to a setting that feels made for it.
Plantasia in the Gardens invites audiences to experience Mother Earth’s Plantasia as a complete work through high-quality vinyl playback inside Allan Gardens.
This evening creates space to stop, sit, and give the recording our full attention. Surrounded by the Conservatory’s plant life, audiences will be invited to notice how Garson’s electronic textures interact with the architecture, atmosphere, and living environment around them.
The event begins with a short contextual introduction exploring the album’s history and unlikely journey from obscure 1970s recording to beloved work of electronic music.
The album will then be played as a collective listening experience, followed by a moderated conversation reflecting on its legacy, its relationship to plants and technology, and why Plantasia continues to resonate half a century after it was made.
At the centre of the evening is a simple question:
How does where we listen change what we hear?
Plantasia in the Gardens invites you to slow down, listen together, and experience an album as something capable of interacting with the spaces we inhabit and grow within.
Music for plants and the spaces we grow in.
About Friends of Allan Gardens
Friends of Allan Gardens is a volunteer-based charitable organization working to imagine and lead the revitalization of Allan Gardens, one of Toronto’s historic downtown green spaces. Working alongside the City of Toronto and community partners, the organization supports the care, animation and continued evolution of the park and conservatory through horticultural, cultural and community programming.
Friends of Allan Gardens envisions the park and conservatory as a year-round green oasis and vibrant gathering place rooted in education, beauty, cultural exchange and shared stewardship. Through programs that bring people together around plants, public space and community, the organization helps create new ways for Torontonians to experience and participate in the life of Allan Gardens.
About Sacred Bones Records
Sacred Bones Records is an independent record label based in Brooklyn, New York, known for releasing adventurous music that moves across experimental, electronic, psychedelic, post-punk, ambient and other genre-defying forms.
Since its founding in 2007, the label has built a catalogue shaped by distinctive artistic voices, archival rediscovery and a commitment to music that challenges convention. Its reissue of Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia helped introduce the album to a new generation of listeners, extending the life of a recording whose relationship to plants, technology and imaginative listening continues to resonate.
About Polaris Music Prize
Polaris Music Prize is a Canadian charitable arts organization honouring music as art. Through its Album, Song, and Heritage Prizes, Polaris amplifies Canadian artists based on artistic merit — not genre, sales, or algorithmic popularity.
The 2026 Polaris Festival is presented by SiriusXM Canada and made possible through the support of Experience Ontario, Ontario Creates, the City of Toronto’s Cultural Festivals Funding Program, FACTOR, the Government of Canada, Canada’s private radio broadcasters, and the Festival’s many community and venue partners.
