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Roots Demystified: Change Your Gardening Habits to Help Plants Thrive

Articles: Roots Demystified: Change Your Gardening Habits to Help Plants Thrive

We all know that there are roots beneath a plant, and we have a vague mental image of how they must look. We also know that roots need air, water, and nutrients, and we try to provide them. Kourik’s book shows us that we are often imagining root systems incorrectly; what he tells us about how roots operate should help us grow a better garden.

Kourik has suspended excavated plants, even trees, so that he could study the root patterns, and has delved into scientific journals to find research on roots, especially any that included drawings of root systems. Then he combined information gleaned from horticultural research reports with his own direct observations during three decades of work in gardens, to show us how root systems really look and explain how they function.

So how are root systems different from how most people imagine them? Wider, mostly, and also more concentrated near the surface, but with some roots digging deeper than we might have guessed. Kourik dispels the myth that roots mirror the visible part of a plant, or that they extend only as far as the above-ground branches. He re-emphasizes the importance of root hairs, those tiny short-lived filaments that do mos...

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