Round Robin: Herb Music

WOLFTOWN, Virgina—What is the sound of basil growing? Calendula? Hyssop? Sage? I love it when my two passions, music and herbs, collide. That happy collision reinforces my conviction that all life forms are connected, interacting strands of a single, universal, vibrating web. Leading biologists, botanists and physicists now confirm these age-old ­insights, using late-twentieth-century termi­nology.

My herb garden and my choral directing come together when I read that the sound of the universe is A above middle C. This becomes less abstract when I discover that notes of the scale can be attached to particular colors. Remember Walt Disney’s Fantasia, when organ music became a swirl of colors on the screen? I think Disney was on to something profound.

All energy manifests itself in vibrations that can be measured and graphed. We’ve all seen the colors in the visible spectrum. This spectrum arranges radiant energies in order of wavelength (vibrations).

According to William David in The Harmonies of Sound (Marina Del Ray, California: De Vorss & Co., 1980), when the vibrations of colors are matched to sounds, middle C is red, D is green, E is yellow, F is purple-violet, G is orange, A is indigo, and B is blue. Translated, that means that were my ears keener, I would be able to hear D when I lean over to snip back the top leaves of my basils. (Would the cutting away of their heads alter the sound? What is the color of “ouch”?)

Many of us use the word “harmony” when we describe garden design or flower arranging. We select plant and flower groupings for their color harmonies, borrowing a musical term to justify our choices. This color/sound connection adds a delightful dimension when I converse with the green leaves of basil, caress the yellow flowers of calendula, enjoy the spears of purple-violet salvias, cheer on the deep orange of butterfly weeds. I feel emboldened by the red flowers of a pineapple sage, more so by the almost violent red of some zinnias. Sometimes, when I take a midnight walk under the indigo of the new-moon sky, I tune in to that A above middle C. It is a pure, clear sound.