Thanks for links to some of the more interesting ones.
This could be useful for understanding compatibility of plants below ground. The dandelion for example seems totally innocuous, whereas goutweed leaves no space for others.
To add to what aszantu said: plants with deep roots can be very healthy for a garden because they essentially draw nutrients that have soaked deeper into the soil back up. So one way of looking at them is that they are basically mining soil nutrients from below for your garden for free. Perhaps that will make repeatedly mulching them a less frustrating task.
Also, while there are of course legitimate reasons to consider certain plants weeds (e.g. they maybe be poisonous, toxic, or displace other plants that you like more), dandelions are mainly the victim of marketing from pesticide manufacturers half a century ago.
they're amazing, you can make salad with lemon and salt, or fry in butter and eat with your steak. Also the roots are edible. And dandelion pulls nutrients for other plants from below, once the nutrients have been used up, the dandy will leave on its own.
Those are extreme examples, most probably in sand or a loose mix. Roots need oxygen also so can grow a lot in this conditions as long as they are watered.
Most dandelions live in heavy clay. There will be much shorter, reaching just the phreatic level.
A massive effort led by Herr Dipl. -Ing Dr. Erwin Lichtenegger going from 1960 up till 2009 was what I looked at. Was interested for a while to get these into a 3D format but never got a reply from the library or the Pflanzensoziologisches Institute. I think these would look great animated and can only wonder what the good doctor would have achieved archiving with today's tools. Effort and dedication like that applied over time is a rare thing I am glad they are well preserved as works of art as much as science.
Ps also the workbooks of Dr. Santiago Ramon y Cajal on brain neurons are museum quality pieces with some startling similarities to these roots from a distance.
RIP my friend. Good thing you found the energy to warn us before dieing.
By the way, your first sentence is missing a verb. Your second sentence is missing the word "way". Your third sentence should end with a period and the first word should be capitalized.
I hope you can still use your last breaths to correct these mistakes. We must give our everything to avoid further casulties in future generations.
How were these drawings made? It seems the only accurate way would be to painstakingly excavate soil around the root systems a few tiny clumps at a time so as to record how the root system really is shaped prior to any disturbance. This would mean slowly observing the root system from shallower to deeper levels, then reconstructing the side views seen in the drawings.
Growing the plants in some sort of 2D glass observation vessel in order to observe the roots from the side would cause the roots to grow more unusually than in nature.
But then they have that annoying rule about saying a "zero" when there is a 0 for a magnitude between non-zero digits, for example 108 is one-hundred-zero-eight.
Yeah that is weird. Because usually a "十" would mark the ten-count anyway, so saying a single digit could only be the ones-count, but they interpret it then differently to mean 80, even if you do not say "十". To me this is not logical and is unintuitive.
Nobody really uses 1.18k outside of math, engineering, and scientific contexts either.
A kagi or Google search for 1.18k in quotes returns this very HN thread and mostly a bunch of resistors, very few organic uses (some youtube videos about subscriber counts is all I see).
These are amazing and very informative. There is an important caveat to consider: how roots actually grow depends a lot on the soil. Sand or clay, moisture and especially if and where there is compaction has a huge impact. A lot of root systems can't even penetrate heavily compacted soil, so you can imagine there is a lot of variability.
Wow, these are astonishing. The trees have much shallower roots than I thought. I assumed they went down as deep as the tree is tall! And the smaller plants have much deeper roots than I thought.
And much wider that most people think. Generally the roots of trees are 1,5x to 2x the crown.
Roots need oxygen, going more than a few meters down in the soil and conditions aren't very beneficial anymore. Most of the soil life (and nutrients) are in the top few inches.
They're pen drawings, done by hand. Most of the history of Botany was done this way - Drawings by skilled artists, using life samples painstakingly removed from the soil, as was most of the history of biology and physiology.
You can grow plants specifically for this purpose, using less dense soil so that you can more easily extract the root system without damaging it.
Yes. There aren't two root systems identical. I assume that this plants were cultured in a sandy or hydroponic mix.
But the main goal is the generalization and to know how long roots can grow. For trees they wanted to know also if roots can grow up the hill against gravity (they do it all the time). This is useful to understand how stable is the structure and how useful to fix soil in place and fix erosion processes.
The dune melon root is particularly funny. You can almost hear the root sniffing water right and left in the Namibian desert
My initial ideas were injecting the tree with a chemical and zapping it with radar, and growing it hydroponically in translucent gravel. But this seems wildly impractical.
They probably just have a team of students dig them up with a brush, one layer of soil at a time.
There's a computerphile video [0] that looks at one way people take 3d x-rays to look at plant roots (I haven't re-watched it yet so unsure if it's related to the article)
Edit: Look at about 6:50 in the video for a render of a root system.
Aren't all the drawings just one 2d slice? You would just have to cut the soil in a line through the plant with a sharp spade and remove enough on one side to make the drawing.
There's some detail here about how British researchers developed apple tree rootstocks, including photos of whole trees that have been excavated and reassembled.
Yeah, the methodology here is bothering me. Did they really dig 4m+ deep? Must be really hard work, but impressive nevertheless. Maybe they did use some water spades to ease up the digging?
If you're doing any kind of gardening, you can find the root system of many common plants and weeds. Some examples:
- bindweed: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/193/rec/1 the white meaty rhizomes go at about 10 cm but the actual roots can go much much deeper (2.2 meters in this example)
- horsetail: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/753/rec/1 also grows deep roots; extremely sturdy - resists many herbicides and can spread through spores.
- goutweed: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/1435/rec/... dense network of thin roots
- dandelion: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/676/rec/2 this example has roots reaching 4.5 meters!
- potato: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/1014/rec/... was looking for a tomato plant but found this instead (they are the same genus); you can see the tubers too.
- carrot: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/1049/rec/... the edible taproot is not the only part