Lay's Traveling Greenhouse Lets You Get Up Close with Real, Live Plants

The King considers a potato plant first-hand.

Flickr user Diane Bondareff

​We all know how hard it is to remember what it's like to be up-close in a room with plants, so Dallas-based Frito-Lay's doing us a solid this summer, along with lucky folks in five other cities, trucking around a 70-foot mobile greenhouse through the thick of our urban core.

Inside their mobile greenhouse exhibit, the company says, you'll "have an opportunity to interact first-hand with plants."

Just how you're meant to interact with them is up to you, but apparently you're meant to consider how all these plants fit together along the chips' assembly lines. If you try it out and decide this human-plant interaction is for you, well, good news: Lay's is passing out 8,000 free herb-growing starter kits for budding home gardeners along the tour -- one of the few spots in the city they're peddling bags of basil without trying to label it as something else.

The tour made its first stop earlier this week in Times Square, then headed to Boston, Detroit, Chicago and L.A., before coming home to the downtown Dallas YMCA and Rangers Ballpark in Arlington on August 24. Jump for a look at who all the the plants have brought along for the ride.

Courtesy Matt Felder

Jack Wallace Jr., left, with Big Jack, his farming dad, in a Frito-Lay ad.

​Best of all, inside the trailer you'll get to chat up a real, live potato farmer -- Edinburg's Jack Wallce, Jr., one of the mainstays of Lay's ongoing Look how local! ad campaign, who was also along for the New York stop. Wallace, with his father Big Jack, was also featured in a series of Frito-Lay ads last year, meant to help draw out the story of their potato chips by connecting their image to the folks running their potato-growing operations around the country.

For maximum greenery, Lay's is donating 50 plants to local commnity gardens in each of the cities -- no word yet who the lucky recipients are going to be here in Dallas. It may not be the most cloying Lay's ad campaign out there, but for laying down the Astroturf so thick to green the company's image, it's close.