The artwork reads as a ring of soil. Around the edge, in capitals, runs the line LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. Inside that ring sit four root vegetables — carrot, radish, beet, onion — each with a small smiling face and each with its roots drawn down into the earth. The carrot is orange and tapered; the radish is round and red; the beet is dark and bulbous; the onion is pale and layered. Their roots are visible, thin lines threading into the soil below them. The composition is circular, almost like a wreath or a seal, and the vegetables face outward toward the viewer, as if they are a small committee of the garden bed.
What interests me is the double meaning of the verb to root. In one sense, it means to send down roots — to establish, to anchor, to grow in place. In another, it means to cheer for someone, to offer support from the sidelines. The shirt’s line uses both at once: let’s root for each other can mean let’s cheer for each other and also let’s put down roots together. The second half, and watch each other grow, tilts the phrase toward the agricultural metaphor, but it also carries a quiet demand. To watch someone grow is not the same as to let them grow. There is a difference between encouragement and surveillance, between support and expectation.
The four vegetables are smiling. That is the detail I keep returning to. A carrot with a face is a cartoon, but a carrot with a face and visible roots is something else: it is a diagram of mutual dependence. The roots are what hold the vegetable in the ground, and they are also what the vegetable sends out into the soil to take up water and nutrients. In the drawing, the roots are exposed, as if the soil has been cut away to show the mechanism. The smile sits above the roots, which is to say that the visible cheerfulness rests on an invisible network of exchange. That is a fair description of any garden, and of most relationships.
The shirt is sold by Quirky Cotton Collective under the title Let’s Root For Each Other And Watch Each Other Grow Garden. The phrase let’s root for each other shirt is the kind of query that brings a reader to a listing like this one, and the design answers it with a literal image: roots, drawn. I am not going to claim that the shirt will make anyone a better gardener or a better friend. It is a piece of printed cotton with a pun on it. But the pun is doing more work than it first appears to do, because it holds two incompatible ideas in the same word. Cheering is vocal and external; rooting is silent and subterranean. The shirt asks you to do both at once.
There is a long tradition of vegetable portraiture in Northern European art — the anthropomorphic carrot, the beet with a face, the onion that looks like a small bald man. These are usually comic, and this design is comic too. But the comedy is gentle, and the circular arrangement gives it a formal quality. The vegetables are not scattered; they are placed. The carrot sits at one point of the circle, the radish at another, the beet and onion at the others. Each has its own root system, and each root system is drawn separately, so that the four plants are shown as individuals rather than as a single mass. That is the quiet argument of the design: mutual support does not require uniformity. The carrot does not become a beet in order to cheer for the beet.
The phrase watch each other grow is the part that gives me pause. Growth is not always visible. A root vegetable spends most of its season underground, and the part above the soil is only the last stage of a long process. To watch someone grow, in the sense the shirt intends, is to pay attention over time, to notice the small changes that are not dramatic. That is a different kind of watching from the kind that demands a performance. The smiling faces on the vegetables are, in this reading, a little misleading: they suggest that growth is cheerful and continuous, when in fact it is mostly slow and dark and occasional. But the roots are there to correct the smiles. The roots are the honest part of the drawing.
I find the design most interesting when I stop reading the words and look only at the arrangement. Four vegetables, four smiles, four root systems, one circle. The circle is closed, which means there is no outside and no inside; every vegetable is both center and edge. That is a better model of mutual support than a hierarchy, and it is a better model of a garden bed than a row. The shirt is not a gardening manual, and it does not pretend to be. But it has a visual argument, and the argument is that support is structural: it is in the roots, not in the smile.
The shirt is available at the Quirky Cotton Collective listing. I have not worn it, and I am not recommending it as a garment. I am reading it as a drawing, which is what it is: a small circular diagram of four plants that cheer for each other and send their roots down into the same soil. The soil is not shown, except as a line. The rest is inference, which is where the pleasure lies.
This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.