A harvested ginger rhizome

A Euphorbia plant sending out rhizomes

In botany and dendrology, a rhizome (from Ancient Greek: rhízōma "mass of roots",^[1] from rhizóō "cause to strike root")^[2] is a stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes. Rhizomes may also be referred to as creeping rootstalks or rootstocks.

If a rhizome is separated into pieces, each piece may be able to give rise to a new plant. This is a process known as vegetative reproduction and is used by farmers and gardeners to propagate certain plants. Examples of plants that are propagated this way include hops, asparagus, ginger, irises, Lily of the Valley, Cannas, and sympodial orchids. Some examples of rhizomes that are used directly in cooking are ginger, turmeric, galangal, and fingerroot.

The Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides) is an example of a tree that propagates using a rhizome. Aspen clonal colonies in the American West, such as the large Pando colony in Utah, may have been living for over 1 million years. The rhizome of an aspen colony is the key to its longevity. Foragers, insects, fungus, and forest fires may destroy the above-ground portion of the tree, but the underground rhizome is somewhat protected against these threats.

A stolon is similar to a rhizome, but, unlike a rhizome, which is the main stem of the plant, a stolon sprouts from an existing stem, has long internodes, and generates new shoots at the end, such as in the strawberry plant. In general, rhizomes have short internodes; they send out roots from the bottom of the nodes and new upward-growing shoots from the top of the nodes. It is a method of reproduction for plants. A stem tuber is a thickened part of a rhizome or stolon that has been enlarged for use as a storage organ.^[3] In general, a tuber is high in starch, for example, the common potato, which is a modified stolon. The term tuber is often used imprecisely, and is sometimes applied to plants with rhizomes.

Some plants have rhizomes that grow above ground or that lie at the soil surface, including some Iris species, and ferns, whose spreading stems are rhizomes. Plants with underground rhizomes include gingers, bamboo, the Venus Flytrap, Chinese lantern, Western poison-oak,^[4] hops, and Alstroemeria, and the weeds Johnson grass, bermuda grass, and purple nut sedge. Rhizomes generally form a single layer, but in Giant Horsetails, can be multi-tiered.^[5]

See also[link]

• Corm
• Mycorrhiza
• Aspen

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Rhizomes

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (February 2010)

John David Ebert (born June 26, 1968) is a writer, thinker & raconteur interested in mythology and popular culture and the myriad ways they intersect with modern life. He is respected for the breadth & depth of his scholarship and generosity in sharing it, most propitiously in his engrossing series of You Tube videos on subjects ranging from Rudolph Steiner, Oswald Spengler, Jean Gebser & Marshall McLuhan, to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley & The Beatles.

John David Ebert's style of discourse has been described variously as conversational, relaxed, intimate, erudite, witty, discursive, polemical, off-the-cuff, solemn, brilliant. His growing audience, while tending to skew towards those who came of age around or after the end of the Cold War, seems united less by age or background than the shared awareness of love of learning & wisdom....a feeling of being short-changed if not outright betrayed by compulsory and higher "Education"....which Ebert's spontaneous penchant for thinking extemporaneously vividly illuminate Plato's observation that learning is a form of remembering -- a natural, joyful state.

[edit] Twilight of the Clockwork God - 1999

Ebert's first book is a collection of his interviews with seminal scholars & scientists Stanislav Grof, Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, Deepak Chopra, Ralph Abraham, William Irwin Thompson, Lynn Margulis, Brian Swimme. The book is supplemented by introductory essays preceding each subject and two more essay-length meditations on the possible future of the sciences and more generally, science itself, thus anticipating the breakdown of cultural consensus about "truth" characterizing high-tech consumer society during the early 21st Century. (The book's title does homage to Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

[edit] Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons - 2005

Ebert's second book Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society is an examination of the last three decades of film, and in particular, it looks at the influence of mythology upon the cinema. Beginning with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, the book walks the reader through a labyrinth of celluloid ideas.

He attempts to show how the movie theater emerged out of the camera obscura, which in turn was bequeathed to the West by the Arabs, who had carried on and miniaturized Plato's cavern cosmology, confining it to their theory of optics. Thus, in Ebert's view, the movie theater is a vestigial survival of the ancient Paleolithic cosmology of the telling of stories before flickering firelight inside of a cave. The Arabs, in preserving an optical theory which, in contrast to the Greeks, viewed the eye as a sort of miniature cavern, eventually led, by way of a long story, to the camera obscura and hence, to the blowing up of the movie theater as a sort of large Arabic vision of the eyeball-as-cave. As Ebert writes:

At this point in our cultural history of the world as cavern, we arrive at a nexus where optics, cosmology and the origins of cinema converge, for the principle of the camera obscura was indeed the ancestor of the movie theater. "Camera obscura" is Latin for "dark room," and if you miniaturize a room so that it becomes portable, then you're got a "camera." If you then line up a series of cameras, as Muybridge did, in order to capture the motion of a galloping horse through a sequence of still photographs, then your portable "room" is on the way to becoming enlarged again, but this time into the size of a public cavern with which to encompass the illusion of motion you have captured with the help of the little djinn of your technology. In fact, the entire world of the cinema may be regarded, a la McLuhan, as an extension of the human eye, for the movie theater is itself a kind of magic eye shared by the public, like the Graea, the three blind witches of Greek mythology, who could see only by sharing one eye.^[1]

[edit] Dead Celebrities, Living Icons - 2010

Ebert's third book "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar" examines the popular mythology of the dying and reviving celebrity. It maintains that the current adulation of mega-famous celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and James Dean corresponds to a modern myth formation in the contemporary psyche that is analogous to the role of the Catholic saints in the Middle Ages. Certain celebrities, such as Princess Diana or Michael Jackson, generate a near-religious aura because they activate fairy tale-like archetypes in the collective psyche, especially as the result of a tragic death, which casts a mythic aura about such personages. As Ebert writes:

The fatal quality shared by these particular celebrities was an effect of accelerating their personae to light speed via the electronic media of their day. For the process of exposing the personality to electronic replication and duplication tends to have a disintegrative effect upon it by splitting it asunder into multiple egos--like the thousand-fold Malkoviches in Being John Malkovich. These egos can proliferate with such bewildering speed that the accelerated individual soon finds himself thrust into playing roles--and donning masks--that he had no idea would be required of him. These clones and doppelgangers are like golems, for they are nearly impossible to kill once awakened to the light of day. Their originators tend, more often than not, to become unwitting victims in a war of images and icons that often require them to sacrifice their lives. ^[2]

[edit] The New Media Invasion - 2011

Ebert's fourth book "The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake" is a series of essays recording the devastating effects of the so-called Digital Revolution, beginning with the turning over of the Internet to the private sector in 1995, upon traditional printed media. The book discusses the traumatic effects of the New Media Invasion upon the media of the Gutenberg Galaxy, noting the disappearance of record stores, the near disappearance of book stores, and the folding up of magazines and newspapers with the rise of new media such as the Internet, cell phones, the Kindle, the iPad, the iPod, etc. The book's chapter on Wikipedia, interestingly, frames the advent of this particular website as a "knowledge catastrophe." As Ebert writes:

With Wikipedia, furthermore, 'knowledge' is never complete. It never even attains the status of knowledge, for the information that appears on Wikipedia may disappear within minutes. A knowledge base which appears and disappears without warning cannot be regarded in any way, shape or form as an encyclopedia of any kind. If what I just read a few minutes ago may disappear since I read it, and thus no longer has the status of being 'true,' then what I have read cannot be regarded as knowledge at all, but rather something more akin to the status of rumor, which is information that may or may not be true and may even change its status in the very process of its utterance. ^[3]

[edit] The Age of Catastrophe: Disaster and Humanity in Modern Times - Forthcoming: Nov. 2012

Works[link]

• Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science & Spirituality at the End of an Age (Council Oak Books, 1999)
• Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (Cybereditions, 2005)
• Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar (Praeger - Greenwood, 2010)
• The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake (McFarland Books, 2011)
• The Age of Catastrophe: Disaster and Humanity in Modern Times (McFarland Books, 2012)

See also[link]

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References[link]

External links[link]

• Ebert's website