Pepper Pot

Sgt. Pepper’s Pot Plants

One of the most irritating things I know of is when a complete error is repeated ad nauseum! If you think the flowerbed on the Pepper cover looks like an “open grave” I suppose that’s your choice. Having seen a good many open graves in my life, it looks like an odd flower border to me. (I do think the floral clock in Paul’s design would have looked a great deal better.) However, it’s the endless repitition about the “pot plants” shown on the album cover that makes me want to recommend that the writer change his focus to George W. Bush where mythology is a requirement.

Of course, I suppose city people may never have actually seen a marijuana plant and therefore be unable to recognize the leaves, but a very little research of T-shirts could quickly amend that ignorance! For one thing, cannabis is a rather tall, rangy plant; one as fully leafed-out as those on the album would be two or three feet tall. For a final thing, these plants in no way resemble pot.

The first photograph at the head of this entry is of a marijuana plant; the center graphic is an enlargement of one of the plants on the Pepper cover; the third photo is of Aluminum Plant, Pilea cadierei, a popular house plant originally from tropical Southeast Asia. There are a couple other common houseplants that might be the ones we see on the cover but they are far less common and a good deal less likely.

I’m sorry to disappoint all you heads out there but this is one of the stupidest Beatle myths going, possible even less rational then the Paul Is Dead hoorah. At least this one is so very easily shown to be mistaken while proving that someone is alive is difficult unless you can arrange to meet them face to face – and Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people actually have met Paul face to face since 1967 (or whenever) there seem to be a few people who still treasure the idea.

In the case of the pot plants on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, please remove it from your mind. No doubt the living adults in the room at the time the photograph was taken would have liked the idea of using cannabis plants, but they didn’t.