On the edge of the McKenzie River in Oregon, the roots of this western redcedar hold the soil in place.
I’ve been fascinated by roots on forest walks near my Oregon home this summer. Tree roots must be the Rodney Dangerfield of the forest--usually unseen, lacking the beauty of the above-ground tree, they get no respect. But since I started to look more closely at roots, I’ve become so intrigued by them that I hardly look up as I walk through the forest.
I live in a forest of Douglas-firs, redcedars, and grand firs that rooted in the legacies of an old-growth forest clearcut in the late 1940s. Seedlings rooted on logs and stumps left behind after the logging. As the legacy logs and stumps crumble, the tree roots that grew through and around them are exposed as twisted, arched, and humped shapes, permanently grotesque but providing fantastic burrow entrances for chipmunks.
Beyond the forest surrounding my home, I walk through a 10-year-old clearcut. A timber company logged their second-growth forest a decade ago. Caterpillar tractors left torn-up stumps on the sides of logging roads and pushed unmerchantable trees into giant bonfire piles. Charred roots of uprooted second-growth trees are scattered among the rotting roots and stumps of the older forest, gradually disappearing in the vigorous third-growth forest of planted Douglas-firs. Uprooted, the twisted tree roots become meaningless contortions, forms like abstract sculptures scattered among the young conifers. It takes years for the upturned roots to soften and decay.
Beyond the clearcut, national forest covers the mountainside in a crazy quilt of legacy patches of old growth, other patches of maturing second-growth forest, and a few stands of young trees planted after logging. Everywhere I walk, roots are knitting the forest and mountainslope together, penetrating and binding the layers of old wood, soil, and rock. Scientists have calculated that in Pacific Northwest old-growth forests, total root mass in the soil may have a greater biomass than the giant trees aboveground.
Roots don’t do it alone. Just as Theseus had Ariadne’s thread to lead him out of the Minotaur’s maze, roots have thread-like allies that enable their survival underground. The allies, known as mycorrhizal fungi, live as microscopic filaments in the soil. These filaments grow in a tangled network that permeates a healthy forest soil. The filaments envelop roots, but the roots are not infected or decaying. In a symbiotic relationship, the roots depend on the fungal filaments to absorb water and minerals from the soil, and share it with the roots. Mycorrhizal fungi greatly multiply the amount of water and minerals roots are able to absorb. Roots, for their side of the symbiotic bargain, provide sugars to the fungi, which are not able to photosynthesize. Roots and fungi are tangled inseparably in the soil, both physically and ecologically.
The possession of powerful allies is not the only trait that roots share with mythical heroes. Roots are also shapeshifters. First, some background. When a seed sprouts, one shoot grows upward into the light, becoming the plant stem, and one shoot grows downward into the dark, becoming the root. Forever after, the above-ground plant seeks sunlight. Meanwhile, the root grows ever deeper.
It’s miracle enough that leafy stem and whitish root grow from the same seed, each knowing which direction to grow. But puzzle over this--when a flood tears up riverbank plants, in many species, fragments of broken roots can grow into new plants. There’s no germ plasm, as in a seed, but just a broken piece of root, which is already a specialized plant tissue. That fragment, that whitish wormlike root, somehow contains the knowledge of how to grow the aboveground plant, with exactly the shape of leaf--serrated, smooth, oval, lanceolate, and so forth--and exactly the flower of its kind. It’s as if a fragment of human intestine could grow into a new human being.
Thus, it seems to me that the standard devices of mythology--powerful allies, shapeshifters, awesome powers of survival--describe ecological truths. I love that the magical, multilayered views of the world found in mythology and literature have so much in common with ecological models of how forests work. It turns out that my degree in English literature is a valuable ally that’s helping me to understand the forest.
