William Scheick

 

I was a green-19, a big-city boy, when my botany professor introduced me to some basics about handling certain tuberous, rhizomatic and fibrously rooted plants. One day, while we were chatting in a workroom at the rear of her lab, she yanked a large rootbound plant from its pot. My naïve instinct at the time would have been to treat the plant more gently, and maybe she saw my eyes slightly widen in surprise at her seemingly rough handling of it. Pointing to the densely compacted root ball exposed on the table, she said: "Plants are tougher than they look."

 

And then, without clueing me in about what was coming, she suddenly grabbed a clever and slashed the mass into dirt-strewn quarters. Thwack! Thwack! - two loud, forceful and decisive chops. Probably my eyes widened even more at that moment. I already knew her to be a stern taskmaster in the classroom, but this workroom exhibition hinted at something else - perhaps some darker inclination lurking deep within professorial hearts? A few years later, I would know more about such possibilities after starting Amanda Cross's fictional series featuring murderous academics.

 

My botany professor was no doubt enjoying her performance, but she was right about the toughness of plants, particularly roots. That day, she was dramatically debunking the commonly held notion that root balls always require considerable care during transplantation. I had previously heard about "potting up" and repotting of large plants treated as if they carried invisible tags with the warning, "Do not disturb." And even today, this hand-me-down notion of root fragility is still prevalent, when actually this belief mostly applies to seedlings, air-layered transplants, some saplings, a few established plants, such as flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) - in short, generally very young, unestablished plants with immature root development. 

The tabled workroom transplant was obviously rootbound. Numerous thick roots had formed a helmet-shaped mass molded by the curved edge of its now-discarded container. Simply plopping such a rootbound plant into a roomier container would likely not foster an ideal outcome - "likely" because some plants (such as ficus, agapanthus and African violets) do prefer to be rootbound. Usually, however, when rootbounding is moderate to extensive, simply providing new dirt and more room will not be enough. Even when the roots are still tiny and soft, if they have begun to circle, they will often continue to do so and also increasingly thicken - to the detriment of the performance of most plants.

While holding each of the plant quarters over a bin, my professor loosened the outer roots by massaging them free from their circling pattern. Disentangled from one another and dangling from their center, the roots were now freed from the mass and ready to be realigned horizontally for reestablishment in a larger pot - except that, in this case, the outward reach of some exceeded the diameter of the new containers. So, she pruned the oversized, woody roots considerably, reducing them to mere stubs poking out of the quartered clumps. "You can prune roots just like branches," she told me. Done right, she added, pruning encourages the growth of new roots while the repotted plant adapts.

Over many years since my introduction to that "rough" plant surgery, I have often used my professor's tough-love division technique to reinvigorate the health and increase the number of my plants. I use a hand miter-saw rather than a clever - after all, I don't have any "hanging-around" naïve teenagers to theatrically impress. Sometimes I sink the root-ball portions in shaded buckets, filled with two inches of water, until I am ready to tuck the segments into new soil. I have even successfully divided annuals by cutting recently purchased crowded plugs in half and then gently brushing loose the fibrous roots that had already formed tight encircling masses within their commercial six-packs.

 

William Scheick is a  Texas Gardener contributing editor and the author of Adventures in Texas Gardening  (Texas A&M University Press).

Editor's Note: Gardening news is slow at the beginning of the year, and many gardeners are unable to work in their gardens during winter. We thought you might enjoy a change of pace during this slow season, so following is a gardening-themed short story presented for your enjoyment. - Michael Bracken, editor