From The Telegraph:
Black Sabbath helps plants to grow but Sir Cliff Richard 'kills them' Playing a constant diet of heavy metal music helps plants to bloom, it appears, but beware the crooning of Sir Cliff Richard. For one of Britain's leading gardeners has said playing a catalogue of Sir Cliff's greatest hits to plants could in fact kill them off.
Chris Beardshaw, from Gardeners’ Question Time, claimed different genres of music would encourage plants to grow at different rates, with songs by Black Sabbath helping them to bloom.
But, in an experiment conducted by his horticultural students, plants played the collected works of Sir Cliff “all died”.
The experiment, where alstroemerias were treated to four different styles of music, found that plants surrounded by classical scores grew slightly shorter than those in silence, but were “slightly more floriferous and there was slightly less pest and disease”.
Beardshaw, who also appears on Gardeners’ World, added exposing others to Sir Cliff Richard had been a total disaster, killing off all plants involved.
"We set up four glasshouses with different sorts of music in to see what happened to the plants,” he will tell listeners of Gardeners’ Question Time this afternoon.
"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."
“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."
He added: "The alstroemerias in the Cliff Richard house all died. Sabotage was suspected but we couldn't prove it."