Sprouting Onion Roots Vertical Greetings Card
Where the Onion Actually Begins
Everything about an onion's shape argues that the bulb is the plant. It isn't. The bulb is a bud, a tightly packed set of modified leaf bases wrapped around a growing point, and the true stem of the plant has been squeezed almost flat into a small disc at the very bottom, known to botanists as the basal plate. Every layer of the onion, every root, and eventually the flowering stalk if the plant is left long enough to produce one, all originate from that single compressed disc. It is easy to miss entirely when eating an onion, since it is usually the first part trimmed away and discarded, but it is the only genuinely stem-like tissue the whole bulb possesses.
This piece follows the roots that emerge directly from it once a stored bulb has broken dormancy — fine, pale, fibrous threads pushing out from the flattened base in a way that looks almost accidental compared with the tidy, layered geometry of the bulb above. A stored onion left too long in a cupboard or a fruit bowl will often send these roots out into open air, questing for soil and moisture that are not there, a visibly hopeful gesture from a plant with no way of knowing it has been left on a kitchen shelf rather than planted in a bed. It is one of the more quietly touching things a piece of stored produce can do.
Roots of this kind do real botanical work even in this unpromising setting. Fine root hairs, too small to see without magnification, are what actually manage the job of drawing in water and dissolved minerals; the visible fibrous roots this card shows are closer to the plumbing than the pump, structural threads distributing what the finer hairs further along have absorbed. In a planted onion, this same root system anchors the bulb and feeds it through an entire growing season before the leaves above ground have done enough work to make the bulb worth harvesting at all.
Watercolour handles the paleness and slight translucency of new root growth in a way flat drawing alone would flatten, while a firmer drawn line keeps the tangle of individual roots legible rather than collapsing into a formless mass. Together they hold both the delicacy and the specific, countable structure of something most people throw away without a second look.
This is one of four cards following a single onion through the stages of an unplanned second life, this instalment concerned with the part of the plant usually trimmed off and forgotten before anyone gets as far as the kitchen.
It is printed on textured white matt 324gsm card, 5 x 7 inch, with a plain interior for your own words, a white envelope, and a biodegradable seal-sleeve for posting. Original watercolour and drawing by artist and designer Sally Price.
Sprouting Onion Roots Vertical Greetings Card — 5 x 7 inch, Textured White Matt 324gsm card. View the piece