What lies beneath

The trees around me are roaring into spring leaf, putting out buds and seeds and flowers and leaves in a dizzying variety of ways. But these are only the most visible signs of plant variety. Root systems are every bit as varied. Someone's recently digitized the source sketches for the Wurzelatlas (1960-2002) of Lore Kutschera and Erwin Lichtenegger.  There are over 1000, deliriously different. Here are some, from the A section.

If it boggles the mind a little to imagine how Lichtenegger and Kutschera were able to excavate these delicate structures (perhaps they're not that delicate after all) and then represent them in 2 dimensions, it's more interesting still to consider that Kutschera was the head of the Pflanzensoziologisches Institut in Klagenfurt (Austria), which studied plants not on their own but in interspecies communities. (If plant sociology is unfamiliar, even under its more common name phytosociology, it's because it goes against the grain of US scholarship, which, for human sociological reasons, imagines nature composed of discrete individuals best understood on their own.)

Remarkable as each of these systems is on its own (I've inverted three to celebrate their bonzai beauty, Galium Verum at top, Zygophyllum xanthoxylon below, and Aster amellus in the middle, to see if you were paying attention), no plant species lives alone. These roots - the brains of plants, and their most active and interactive parts - would be entwined with all sorts of others (well, not all sorts - hence the science of plant sociology), all woven into a hub of interaction by mycelial webs, themselves a cosmos of fungal fraternizing.

At an Earth Day panel on what a "curriculum for the Anthropocene" might look like, my New School colleague social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove, building on a book she published in 2004, spoke of the emotional "root shock" of populations displaced by cascading changes, traumatized by being uprooted and barely able to put down new roots. We're not plants, though doubtless more plantlike than we realize, but how fragile and complex are all of our rootings, interwoven with myriad others in ways our linear language and atomistic understandings can barely apprehend.