Drawing on the various ways of representing plant and tree roots in Renaissance botanic works and those of later centuries, i.e. in by Leonhart Fuchs’s, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s and Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s canonical works, as well as in those of contemporaneous scholars and artists such as Francis Hallé and Giuseppe Penone, the paper analyses the advances and dead-ends of these representations which endeavoured, via images and words, to make this unvisible part of the plants visible. The article thus shows how these representations participate in the construction of renewed perceptions of the world of plants and lead to reconsidering the tangible world and poetic language.