the.com/roots
the quiet engineers drinking the planet upside down while the leaves take all the credit
means The underground parts of a plant that anchor it and draw in water and nutrients — or, more broadly, a person's origins, family, or cultural foundations.
from From Old English 'rot,' itself borrowed from Old Norse 'rót,' brought by Norse settlers. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic '*wrot-' and ultimately a Proto-Indo-European root '*wrad-' meaning root or branch — a cousin of Latin 'radix' (think 'radish' and 'radical') and Greek 'rhiza' (as in 'rhizome'). The figurative sense — your roots, putting down roots — grew naturally from the plant: if something holds you to the ground and feeds you, no wonder we reached for it to mean home and ancestry.
- hidden mass
- often outweigh the tree above ground
- underground internet
- trade nutrients via fungal 'wood wide web'
- slow demolition
- crack concrete and burst pipes for water
- deepest known
- a fig root reached 400 feet down
- old language
- 'radical' comes from radix, Latin for root
fig strangler roots amazon — strangler figs in south america that send aerial roots down host trees, eventually killing them