Working on Peculiar Plants with Victoria Bond was one of the most engaging and fascinating projects I've ever been involved with. Here was a marvelous musician - charming, witty and bubbly, like a real person - who, once we had decided on this strange subject matter, produced wonderful ideas, which needed only 'how do we make these work on the harpsichord'. In fact, she found new ways for me to play the harpsichord and got me much worried about the private lives of plants.

Once the pieces had been composed, it was clear that they would make a deeper impact if the listener knew something about the plants and what their bizarre agendas were. Much research went into this; she knew way more about botany than I did, although my wife and I had visited Linnaeus' garden in Stockholm in 1969, and had admired the fastidious labeling the great botanist had attached to each plant. But as part of any performance of Peculiar Plants, this research had to be entertaining as well as instructive, hence the rhymed couplets she and I devised to accompany each plantportrait. When the cycle was published in 2009, we engaged the daring and ingenious artist Lauren Wisbauer Nuzzi to illustrate these exciting and dangerous plants, and we much appreciated Peters' willingness to feature them in the published edition (Henmar-Peters #68297). A fortuitous coincidence accompanied our performance of Peculiar Plants at the Deering Estate in Miami, Florida (1/16/2009). The sponsors were most interested in this piece, as the park, in fact, is a celebrated arboretum with expert botanists in residence. Then an extraordinary thing happened - the sixth plant in our cycle, Ghost Orchid, is a recalcitrant plant that blooms very rarely. It did so when we were in Miami, and the botanic photographers dashed out to the woods to grab a long-awaited shot. The gorgeous result is on the cover of our CD (Albany Records, 2009). The complete cycle of Peculiar Plants is included below (#27a). These are playable on the piano, but they sound creepier in the original harpsichord versions.