Severed Coriander Root Still Alive After 15 Days?

15 days ago, one of the coriander roots was severed half way up, shown here by the green arrow.

I cut the root to see what effect this would have on branching. As indicated last week, unlike the other roots, it initially produced just one lateral branch, although this was longer than those on the other roots.

Now, 15 days later, two new lateral buds (indicated by red arrows) have also appeared.

However, what's even more surprising is that the severed base of the root still seems to be very much alive, complete with pristine white root hairs. Once again, the question arises as to how it is sustaining itself without obvious connection to a leaf as a source of food?

• There is a clean break, so the root has not just healed up and continued as normal.
• There is not much water on the side of the cup, so it is unlikely that nutrients have diffused to the root this way.

It does seems that it's either using sugars previously stored, or it's being fed from the other unsevered roots. As you can see, these have formed a nice group at the base of the cup and are clearly in contact with each other.

What we have here is a community of coriander plants, just as we had with the 'Multi-Plant' * fuchsias.


* The term 'Multi-Plant' is what Ken Pilkington, a fuchsia grower and ex-exhibitor, called this technique of growing several plants in one pot. He found that when he did this, his fuchsias changed their growth habits as they formed communities, and he described these in his excellent book 'How to Grow Fuchsias - A Practical Guide'. I don't want to get into fuchsias here, as we shall be covering these soon elsewhere. But mention is justified because we have a coriander 'Multi-Plant' community, and the effects discovered could be the result of inter plant communication within this community. All we have to do is prove it . . ..