the.com/tuber
the underground vault where plants stash sugar and quietly grow a backup version of themselves.
means A swollen, fleshy underground stem or root—like a potato—that a plant uses to store nutrients and from which new growth can sprout.
from Straight from Latin tuber, meaning 'lump, swelling, or bump'—the same root that gives us 'protuberance' and 'tuberculosis' (literally 'little swelling'). Romans applied it to anything that bulged, including the knobby growths plants push out underground.
clone armyeach eye can sprout a genetically identical new plant
not a rootpotatoes are swollen stems, not roots
toxic greensunlight turns potato skin green and poisonous
famine stakesone tuber blight starved a million Irish in 1840s
ancient larderAndean farmers freeze-dried tubers into chuño millennia ago