You walk through a field of wheat, ryegrass, or clover and notice the sway of stems and leaves. What you cannot see is where most of the action happens.

When you admire a towering oak or a vibrant maple in your backyard, you’re only seeing half the picture. Beneath the surface ...

Vineyard success is built from the ground up, starting with the correct planting and care of new vines. Glenneis Kriel reports on the advice of viticulturist Marko Roux on how growers can give vines ...

The shoots of plants get all of the glory, with their fruit and flowers and visible structure. But it's the portion that lies below the soil — the branching, reaching arms of roots and hairs pulling ...

You can’t construct a strong building on a weak foundation, and you can’t grow a great corn crop on a weak root system. From freezing temperatures to voracious underground pests and other threats, ...

Plants come in all shapes and sizes, allowing them to fit into unique niches in the landscape, but they can be quite complex organisms. In order to select the most appropriate plants for a given ...

Maize can grow successfully in very different local conditions. An international study has now demonstrated the important role of the plant root system. The researchers analyzed more than 9,000 ...

The drier the region, the fewer seminal roots the maize varieties cultivated there had on average (black figure; the pie chart shows the proportion of varieties with up to one seminal root in yellow, ...