The Plant You See Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

When you look at an iceberg floating on the ocean, you see just the top bit. Tucked beneath the water lies the other 90% of it—the hidden behemoth. Would you believe that looking at a plant could be the same? It's hard to imagine that when looking at house plants. Their pots are so tiny! But out in the wild, the root system of a plant can extend for metres and metres—as tall as you are— even though the leaves and stems and flowers may be only a few centimetres high.

This plant, liverwort or "church steeples," stretches 51 cm above ground—barely brushing an adult's kneecaps. That's the part you see. But under the earth, it extends its roots down three times that far, and out 69 cm in every direction!

In folklore from different countries, this common agrimony was said to ward off witchcraft or to make someone sleep as long as it was beneath their pillow.

Three researchers in Austria literally unearthed these findings over the last 40 years by digging out the fragile roots of plants with a tiny jeweller's tool a lot like what a dentist's hygenist uses to clean teeth. 

Imagine spending 40 years digging in the dirt with these fine "scribers".

Below is the researcher's drawing of a liverwort's roots beneath the earth. The 1000 drawings they created showing the incredible reach of a plant's roots can be seen online in the seven volumes of the Wurzel atlas. 

Illustration of Agrimonia eupatoria's root system reaching 155 cm into the ground and 69 cm out from the centre.

To explore all 1000 of the root drawings, visit the online collection.

Did You Know! The same is true of mushrooms and other fungi too: what we see is just the tip of their iceberg. Check out this earlier article on the blog.

by Adrienne Montgomerie 

Illustration of Agrimonia eupatoria root system from the Wurzelatlas at the Pflanzensoziologisches Institut, in Bad Goisern, Austria—a project led by Prof. Dr. Lore Kutschera (Gustav Fischer Verlag (Elsevier)) is used under CC BY-NC-ND license. • Scriber photograph by Glenn McKechnie, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.