Similar considerations apply to the peculiar features of the root-system.
The root-system is usually small.
The same plants have sometimes a superficial root system in addition, and are thus able to utilize immediately the water from rain showers and perhaps also from dew, as Volkensl maintains.
The great forest-tree has a shoot, which in the course perhaps of hundreds of years, has developed a wide-spreading system of trunk and branches, bearing on the ultimate twigs or branchlets innumerable leaves, while beneath the soil a widely-branching root-system covers an area of corresponding extent.
Protected between the cotyledons and terminating the axis of the plant is the first stem-bud (the plumule of the embryo), by the further growth and development of which the aerial portion of the plant, consisting of stem, leaves and branches, is formed, while the development of the radicle forms the root-system.
