hot take: brace roots, where they occur, are one of the most terrifying plant organs. they just look too much like little squiggly arms seeking strength in the ground….like i think they’re weird and lovely but also im terrified
this species is called the ‘walking palm’
*shudders*
I’d never seen brace roots in person until I grew corn this year. It was a nightmarish heart attack to behold!
tbh i didn’t know about them either until I worked my first manual labor cornfield job and started looking down and noticing that my feet were mere INCHES from the alien arms slowly extending into the surrounding soil day after day and I was like ‘hey what the fuck’ and asked one of the breeders.
it’s one of those things about maize that you don’t notice until you really experience it up close. it’s an incredibly alien plant.
Walking palms move! They put down new roots on one side of the plant, and the old roots on the other side gradually die off. We can tell when their seeds arrived to Hawaii by measuring how far the plants are from the coastline. The first seeds grew plants and those plants moved inland a bit, then dropped seeds, and those seeds grew plants that moved further inward, and so on.
They can ‘walk’ out of garden beds, too. I’ve seen where they’ve done that, some roots planted inside the bed, new roots going into the ground outside the bed. They move to get to new, fertile soil or better light when they’re in less than optimal conditions. Ones that are in perfect conditions don’t move at all.
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