Botanical Resonance: Plants and Sounds in the Garden

Abstract

The Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis is largely composed of right angles and reflective surfaces that move sounds in a closed loop. A cacophonous wail spills out of the first-floor gallery as I walk in to visit Botanical Resonance: Plants and Sounds in the Garden. Curated by Nezka Pfeifer and running through March 2023, this exhibition features installations by three contemporary artists and “explores how plants create and cause sounds in our natural environment and cultural arenas.”To my surprise, Kevin Harris’s Welcome Home Habitat seems to be the only audible artwork in the show. Harris’s artist statement describes this work as a sonic offering for nonnative plants at the garden. Although the specific plants honored are not named, the piece highlights rainforest and river-basin sounds layered in the 12-channel installation. Instead of field recordings, Harris’s soundscape utilizes the uniquely human sounds of oscillators and synthesizers to “let [the plants] know that we do, in fact, care.” Aurally, there is dissonance, though, between the playful celebration the statement invokes and the sharp-edged, constructed sounds, which reverberate like a protest in the nearly empty concrete room. Two wooden boxes painted with silhouettes of hands temper the shrillness. Placing my hands on the speaker boxes, the tactile vibrations hit me at a different register, rhythmic, soothing. Is this how plants experience sound?Upstairs, Brooke Erin Goldstein’s textile installation, Reverberations, considers plant communication and imagines auditory signals transmitted through vibrations and chemicals. The floor-to-ceiling tapestry spans all four walls of a small, inner gallery and bisects the room with quilted, semi-abstract imagery representing grasses above ground and tree roots below. Goldstein’s artist statement envisions sound waves traveling underground through a network of fungi and describes the smell of cut grass as “an olfactory manifestation of the distressing scream that grass makes to signal to other grasses that they are in danger.” Despite this evocative imagery, the installation itself is silent. Visitors are invited to touch the work, and when I slide my fingers across the starched cotton fabric, I can imagine the rustling of grass. Acoustically, this room is the quietest space in the museum, but even with the soft walls, the cooling system dominates.The main gallery upstairs is flanked by glass cabinets and a frescoed ceiling, and here the HVAC sounds like a jet. Although sound in this part of the exhibition is also conceptual, I have a hard time letting the white noise recede to background. This room is filled with botanical curios—musical instruments and their associated plants. There are flutes made of reeds and bamboo, maracas and rattles with their composite seed pods and coconut shells, and a piece of Paubrasilia echinata, which is prized for violin bows because of its red color, suppleness, and density. There are partially constructed guitars with samples of tone wood for resonating chambers, rosewood and ebony for fretboards. There are drums and zithers and the fibers, wood, and cord that construct them, along with historical and geographic context. But there is no audible sound in the exhibit. I want to hear how the instruments sound and how the sonic characteristics of each plant are unique, but I just hear the drone of the air conditioning.Adjacent cases at one end of this gallery feature two 4′ × 8′ digital prints, abstract and densely layered purples and gray shapes, printed on silk, which are part of Annika Kappner’s Liquid Landscapes. The artist describes these silk banners as interwoven analog and digital imagery of mycelium, online networks, and floral designs. The pair is accompanied by two recorded tracks, which are accessed by QR code. These “soundwalks,” as the artist describes them, are collaborations with composer Eric Maltz and combine musical textures, imagined plant sounds, field recordings, and guided meditations that invite the listener to “experience a deep receptivity and awareness of humanity’s coexistence with all forms of life.” Grateful for something else to listen to in this show about sound, I capture the codes and head back downstairs because the museum is about to close and I am freezing.I walk outside, welcoming the summer heat and city sounds, and I load up the first soundwalk. It starts off asking the listener to find a quiet place inside the museum to sit and reflect. Instead I sit on the steps of the Shaw House next door. The sound bed of the recording blends with sounds I hear outside, and it is a little bit hard to distinguish the two. The light instrumentation and calm narration are clearly part of the recording, but what about the birds and insects and cars? The narrator invites me to tune into the polarity of my breathing, in and out, in and out, and after a short while suggests we walk out into the garden. I get up from the steps and walk. I am invited now to tune into the sounds around me, which I have already been tracking, and the recorded sounds drop off to make space for what is present. I take out an earbud to better hear the sounds around me. There are birds whose names I wish I knew, a stream of cars on Tower Grove Avenue, the slap of shoes on sidewalk, a breeze through tree leaves, muffled voices a little way off, and my breath in and out, in and out. Here in the garden, listening, here is botanical resonance.