According to an expert gardener from England, plants love Black Sabbath just as much as metalheads do! Garden guru Chris Beardshaw recently began an experimental program to analyze the reaction of plants when exposed to music, and according to the gardener's studies, the tasty jams of Black Sabbath "worked wonders on a greenhouse full of plants."

In an attempt to eliminate any potential outliers, Beardshaw set up four separate greenhouses while conducting the sonic experiment. The plants within each greenhouse were subjected to different brands of music, and heavy metal served as the preferred music of mother nature. "We set up four glasshouses with different sorts of music in to see what happened to the plants," Beardshaw tells the Guardian. "We had one that was silent – that was a control house – and we had one that was played classical music, we had one that was played Cliff Richard and we had one that was played Black Sabbath … It was alstroemerias we were growing and we bombarded these glasshouses with sound for the life of the plant."

Beardshaw continues, "We were measuring incidence of pest and disease, we were measuring inter-nodal distance, we were measuring the floriferous nature of them and that sort of thing and so the one that was grown as a control house grew really well as you'd expect. The one that was grown with classical music — a soft, almost a caressing of the plant when it is hit with that sort of soundwave — those grew slightly shorter because of the soundwaves bombarding them and were slightly more floriferous and there was slightly less pest and disease. And the ones with Black Sabbath — great big, thumping noise, rowdy music — they were the shortest, but they had the best flowers and the best resistance to pest and disease."

Moreover, the plants exposed to British pop singer Cliff Richard all died! "The alstroemerias in the Cliff Richard house all died," confirms Beardshaw. "Sabotage was suspected but we couldn't prove it."

To check out the full article, head over to the Guardian.

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