The first thing I notice is the soil. Not the words, though they wrap around the whole design in a neat, even arc — LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW — but the soil, or rather the suggestion of it, the way each vegetable’s roots are drawn down into a little brown hatching that stops as abruptly as a thought. Four of them, arranged in a loose row: carrot, radish, beet, onion. All smiling. All rooted.
It is a garden shirt, obviously. The kind of thing you might see at a allotment open day, or on a Saturday morning at a garden centre where the queue for the till snakes past the seed potatoes. But the phrase is doing something more interesting than the picture, and the picture is doing something more interesting than the phrase, and the two of them together have kept me thinking for longer than a novelty t-shirt has any right to.
Let’s root for each other. The pun is right there on the surface: root as in cheer, root as in the thing a plant does underground. But there’s a third meaning lurking, the one that makes the shirt slightly stranger and, I think, better. To root for someone is to want them to succeed. To root, in the horticultural sense, is to establish yourself in the dark. The shirt is asking you to do both at once — to be the cheerleader and the tuber. To grow down as well as up.
And then the second half: and watch each other grow. That’s the bit that gives me pause. Because watching someone grow is not the same as making them grow. It’s a passive, patient, slightly helpless kind of attention. You can water, you can weed, you can stand there with a hose and a worried expression, but the actual growing is none of your business. It happens in the soil, out of sight, on a timescale that doesn’t care about your schedule. The shirt knows this. The smiling vegetables know this. They are smiling, I suspect, because they have accepted it.
I keep coming back to the four of them — carrot, radish, beet, onion — and the way they are drawn with their roots visible. That’s not how you see a root vegetable in real life. In real life the root is the part you eat, the part that’s been doing the work underground while you weren’t looking. To show the roots is to show the hidden part, the part that makes the growth possible. It’s a small act of honesty. The shirt is not just saying look at us, aren’t we growing nicely. It’s saying here is the bit you don’t see.
There’s a version of this shirt that would be unbearable. A version with a motivational quote in a script font, or a cartoon sun with a speech bubble, or the word journey anywhere in the vicinity. This is not that shirt. The colours are plain, the linework is simple, the smiles are just this side of daft. It has the air of something drawn by a person who knows what a beetroot looks like when it’s been left in the ground a week too long — a bit knobbly, a bit eccentric, entirely itself.
The phrase let’s root for each other has a particular tone, too. It’s not I will root for you. It’s not you should root for me. It’s the let’s that does the work — a collective invitation, slightly cajoling, the way you might say let’s get the chairs out or let’s have a cup of tea before we start. It assumes a group. It assumes a shared patch of ground. It assumes that the rooting is mutual, which is a more demanding proposition than it first appears. Mutual support is easy to say and hard to do, because it requires you to be as interested in someone else’s growth as your own, and to accept that they might be interested in yours.
The shirt is available here, if you want to see the whole design for yourself. It’s a standard t-shirt, the kind of cotton that will either become your favourite thing or migrate to the back of the drawer depending on how you feel about smiling root vegetables. I have no strong views on the fabric. I have strong views on the drawing.
What I like most is the way the design refuses to resolve the tension between the two meanings of growth. On the one hand, growth is good: you want your carrots to swell, your radishes to round out, your onions to bulb. On the other hand, growth for its own sake is a trap. Anyone who has ever left a courgette unattended for a week knows that growth without limit is just a marrow. The shirt doesn’t say grow more. It says watch each other grow, which is a quieter, more patient instruction. It’s about attention, not ambition.
And there’s something in the smiling faces that I keep coming back to. They are not smug. They are not competitive. They are just four root vegetables, drawn with their roots showing, doing the thing they do. The carrot is not trying to be a parsnip. The beet is not comparing itself to the radish. They are all in the same soil, and they are all, in their own way, rooting for each other. It’s a small, silly, oddly moving idea. The kind of thing you might wear to a garden centre on a Saturday morning, and then forget about, and then catch sight of in the mirror three hours later and smile at, without quite knowing why.
This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.