East of Eden Plants is a specialist nursery growing and supplying Hardy Exotic plants, including Tropical plants, Mediterranean plants and other world plants, for all your new exotic garden and landscape project adventures. We also specialise in an exciting range of conservatory and interior plants and can undertake all design work for you. Our aim is to supply superior exotic plants and designs to suit all exterior and interior spaces in the UK.

Rootgrow™ mycorrhizal fungi ~ Feeding your Plants for Life

Rootgrow PROFESSIONAL for designers, architects and
landscapers

Trade and wholesale

The Rootgrow™ mycorrhizal range for home use is available from the East of Eden Plants on-line shop now.

Rootgrowplus™ in 360g re-sealable pouches   £11.00

Why use Rootgrow™?
Friendly fungi - mycorrhiza - exist naturally with plants in a well-balanced soil. Over-cultivated plots, new building sites, commercial potting preparations - and new landscaping projects - all share one thing in common: reduced or damaged mycorrhizal presence in the soil.

Naturally occuring in the soil, mycorrhiza pair up with host plants for mutual advantage. Plants that are treated with commercially available mycorrhizal preparations outperform non-treated specimens with remarkable results. Rootgrow™, the result of 30 years' work by a team of bioscientists, is such a product.

This column is just our précis of the word going round on this plantscaper's dream-come-true. We are happy to share this secret with you, because it should be common knowledge - and common practice - to all gardeners. There is no risk of over-populating your soil with this product: if your soil already has sufficient presence of mycorrhizal fungi, more will simply not establish against the already competing fungi. All you will have done is added cheap alginate (seaweed derived nutrients) mixed with clay pellets.

How will you know if you have enough mycorrhizal fungi present before you start? You won't, but if your soil is deficient, then the results may be dramatic! And at these affordable prices, the chance to find out is too good to miss. In any case, all plantings in new commercial compost for seeding, bedding and potting will certainly benefit from the Rootgrow™ treatment.

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew save some of their oldest trees using mycorrhizal fungi.

The Rootgrow™ home
and garden range

We do not need to eulogise about the benefits of Rootgrow™ and our conversion to the cause (although we could!) - we will leave it up to you to follow our links and read the growing (sorry!) enthusiasm for this 21st Century innovation - Nature really does know best.

So, fight drought, fight disease, increase quality natural root growth without forcing - and get trees, hedges and a host of other plants off to a rapid start and a long healthy life - what are you waiting for?

All prices quoted in our on-line shop include VAT.

Just click on any product image to order now, or for the complete range of shop catalogues click here.

Call us on 01752 829178 or 0781 279 7127 for all your hardy exotic, tropical, Mediterranean and other world plant needs.

See our
New garden accessories

How do I use Rootgrow™?

Easy! GUIDANCE NOTES FOR USING ROOTGROW™ MYCORRHIZAL FUNGI

Will my garden be full of mushrooms, then?
No. Not from the addition of Rootgrow™, at any rate. The mycorrhyza contained in the product range, chosen from an estimated 6,000 species, are not harmful to plant growth and do not produce fruiting bodies - they just reach down into the soil, up to ten times the depth of the plant roots, and yield up that amount of extra nutrients.

All Gardeners ~

Within 4 weeks your plant will develop a huge mycorrhizal fungi root system, which will support your plant for its entire lifetime.

Available in 360g size     Buy

Buy this product

Rootgrowplus™ mix for all plants including trees mycorrhiza preparation

Garden plants - plants, plants, plants! Especially our superb offerings of tropical plants, Mediterranean plants, including olives, citrus and cypress, with other world exotic plants for stunning permanent displays of colour, form and texture

Garden projects - come home to the world of your dreams. For the price of a holiday abroad, live the dream in your own home all year round - forever!

Interior plants for Homes - tropical plants, Mediterranean plants, including citrus, and other world exotic plants

Landscapers and commercial growers, contact us for your trade packs and commercial guides for Rootgrow™ mycorrhizal fungi.

Working with nature

The evolution of plants is a fascinating story, and even more so when you realise that they didn’t evolve alone.

Healthy soils for plants consist of a rich environment of which ‘earth’ is but one component.

The soil is a rich environment and includes healthy bacteria and all those clever little soil 'beasties’. Also a must for healthy plants is the abundance of friendly fungi.

It can now be revealed through evolutionary science, in the bi-centenary year of Darwin’s birth, that nearly all plant life on Earth is, to quote another evolutionary scientist Professor Richard Dawkins, ‘utterly dependent on mycorrhizae’.

The first plants evolved to colonise the land emerged from green algae. The great land invasion of plants marks the beginning of Devonian geology. By 416 million years ago seed-bearing plants were colonising the land in great forests. Mycorrhizal fungi are found in fossils from 400 million years ago and will have gone hand in hand with the ability of plants to thrive inland including deserts and mountains.

Modern plants still retain, and rely on, the co-evolutionary symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizal fungi today.

Organic gardeners don't feed the plants, they feed the soil. All soils are essentially fertile; the trick for gardeners is to make this fertility available to plants.

We have been taught that we don’t need to try, that supplying copious quantities of industrial N-P-K fertilisers will do the job. Careless application is a wasteful process at best, positively damaging to the environment at worst. It’s like air dropping food onto a human population at random, on houses, streets, fields, and letting people sort the food out for themselves. Nowadays, there is a more considered approach to feeding plants. While N-P-K fertilisers provide a ‘scaffolding’ of chemicals they do not guarantee success; plant health is more subtle.

Nature’s way

Instead of using massive amounts of N-P-K, most plants have evolved by sharing life with mycorrhizal fungi which supply a much larger secondary root system to provide water and nutrients in exchange for photosynthesised carbohydrates. From the beginning, plant life evolved in partnership with mycorrhizal fungi.

What are mycorrhizal fungi?

Mycorrhizal fungi (pronounced ‘mike-or-rizal’ and meaning ‘fungus roots’) have existed for as long as plants. Fungi are a separate life form from plants and animals. Today, we think of useful fungi solely as a food ‘crop’, like mushrooms and truffles. It is no accident that we find most edible mushrooms, porcini, chanterelles and truffles growing naturally among trees. The trees are supplying them with food! (read about mycorrhizal science) That is how edible mushrooms survive. Not as parasites, killing the trees, but as life-growth partners.

Mycorrhizae (‘mike-or-rizey’, plural) take plant sugars that they can’t create for themselves, in turn for keeping the plant in the best of health by supplying water, nutrients and even defences against harmful bacterial attack. This partnership goes back hundreds of millions of years.

Another form of mycorrhizal fungi and plant relationship that we recognise is lichen (‘like-n’). This unassuming combination is a rigid network of mycorrhizal fungi that has plant cells trapped among its network of ‘branches’. Lichen grows on rocky surfaces and goes brown in drought weather; the green appearance is made by the photo-synthesising plant cells which shut down when water is not present. Yet the mycorrhizal fungi part survives drought, an important trait useful to modern gardeners because all ‘mycorrhized’ plants survive much better in drought, including deserts. When water returns, the lichen mycorrhizae give it to the plant cells so that photo-synthesis can resume.

So, to repeat, ‘most plant life on Earth is utterly dependent on mycorrhizae’. With a few exceptions, notably heathers, rhododendrons and brassicas (cabbages, Brussels sprouts, etc), all plants, especially for us those in modern cultivation, from flowers to fruit to vegetables to trees, shrubs and potted plants and food crops all need a healthy supply of available mycorrhizal fungi to grow to their full potential.

Where soil is disturbed, heavily treated with chemicals, or ‘new’ (as in sterilised bagged compost, or machined as in topsoil loads, road works and newly prepared landscaping, even fallow fields), a new application of mycorrhizal fungi at the roots of transplants and seedlings ensures nature’s natural balance is restored and new introduced plants thrive.

Rootgrow is prepared from British native mycorrhizal fungi and comes in handy sizes from the new RHS-endorsed sachet to the landscaper commercial range.

Mycorrhizal fungi has been proved time and again: rose growers always replant using mycorrhizae. We use Rootgrow mycorrhizal fungi to promote early establishment of plants and to prevent the loss of plantings in, for example, large and expensive specimen trees and to prevent drop-out in multiple plantings like hedges.

But Rootgrow works everywhere. It is especially useful in helping prevent drought stress in plants and can be used in on established plants and trees with companion planting (mycorrhizal roots go a long way, remember). It is also perfect for organic gardening, because the primary job of mycorrhizal fungi is to supply water, nutrients and generally look after the plants it teams up with.

Rootgrow mycorrhizal fungi is a British development continuing for over 30 years, is non-toxic, naturally occurring and GM free. It is cheap and highly efficacious; there is no possibility of overdosing. It is endorsed by the RHS Growers’ Association (their first endorsement of a soil product ever) and David Austen Roses.

Mycorrhiza - more information

The majority of plant species have various kinds of fungi associated with their root systems in a kind of mutualistic symbiosis known as mycorrhiza. The fungi help the plants gain water and mineral nutrients from the soil, while the plant gives the fungi carbohydrates manufactured in photosynthesis.

Mychorrhiza - more information (links open in new window)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plants#Factors_affecting_growth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza

Exceptions for Rootgrow™ and Rootgrowplus™ ~
Rootgrow™ and RootgrowplusT does not work with ericaceous plants: Heathers, nor Rhododendruns, Azaleas or Brassicas.

For all trees, Coniferous and Native Trees,etc. use Rootgrowplus™.

~ Use Rootgrow™ and Rootgrowplus™ everywhere else

Rootgrow Professional

Download the Rootgrow calculator here

Homepage  About Us  Gardens  Garden Accessories  Design  Plants

Business Interiors  Home Interiors  Landscape Projects  Care Guides  Delivery