There is a carrot on this shirt, and it is smiling. Beside it, a radish, a beet and an onion, all four of them arranged in a loose ring, their roots visible in the soil beneath them. Around them runs the sentence: LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. The lettering is plain, the vegetables are cheerful in that slightly generic way of illustrated produce, and the whole thing sits somewhere between a garden centre greetings card and a slogan you might find painted on a plank and hung above a shed door.
I keep coming back to the pun, because it is doing more work than it first appears. To root for someone is to support them, to will them on from the sidelines. To root, for a plant, is to put down the thing that holds you in place. The shirt collapses the two, and in doing so it makes a quiet claim: that encouragement and rootedness are the same act. That to cheer someone on is also to help them stay put.
That is a lovely thought. It is also, I think, a slightly anxious one.
The second half of the sentence is where the trouble starts. Watch each other grow. Growth is the default metaphor for a life well lived, and I have never entirely trusted it. A carrot grows, yes, but a carrot also gets pulled up and eaten. The onion swells and then it is lifted, cured, strung. Growth in a garden is not a straight line toward fulfilment; it is a season, and the season ends. The shirt does not say any of this, of course. It is a shirt. But the vegetables are smiling, and their roots are showing, and I find myself wondering what they know that we do not.
What I notice most, looking at the design, is the soil. The roots are visible — that is the point of the drawing — which means we are being shown the part that usually stays hidden. A carrot’s root is the carrot. A beet’s root is the beet. The radish and the onion are the same: what we eat is what grew downward, out of sight, in the dark. The shirt puts that on display and then asks us to watch each other do it. To watch each other grow is, if you take the drawing seriously, to watch each other do the unglamorous work that happens underground.
I am not sure most of us are very good at that. We are good at watching the leafy part — the promotion, the new kitchen, the holiday photograph — but the root is harder to see and harder to praise. The shirt, with its four cheerful faces, seems to be suggesting that the root is the point. That the visible bit is only ever the top of the plant.
There is a version of this shirt that is simply a nice thing to wear to the allotment. I do not want to overburden it. But I also do not want to pretend it is only that, because the phrase has a second life now, away from gardens. Let’s root for each other has become a way of saying: I am on your side, and I am not in competition with you. In a world that keeps insisting we are all in competition with each other, that is a small act of defiance. The shirt is not a manifesto. It is a cotton t-shirt with a pun on it. But the pun is doing something.
What it is not doing, I think, is promising that growth is endless. The vegetables are root vegetables. They are not vines climbing toward the sun; they are things that swell in the dark and then are harvested. The shirt says watch each other grow, and the drawing quietly adds: and then watch each other be pulled up, and eaten, and made into soup. That is not a sad ending. It is just the ending that root vegetables have. The smiling is not denial. It is the smile of something that knows what it is for.
I have been trying to work out why this particular design has stayed with me, and I think it is the roots. Most gardening shirts show flowers, or seedlings, or a trowel. This one shows the part you are not supposed to see. It shows the carrot’s long orange taproot, the beet’s dark bulb, the radish’s small red globe, the onion’s papery layers, all of them suspended in a cross-section of soil. It is a diagram as much as a decoration. And a diagram of mutual support is a strange and rather wonderful thing to put on a shirt.
The phrase let’s root for each other is, grammatically, an invitation. It is not a statement of fact. It does not say we root for each other; it says let us. That is a small but important distinction. It leaves room for the possibility that we do not, currently, root for each other, and that we might start. It is a suggestion, not a boast. The shirt is not claiming a community; it is proposing one.
I find that more honest than the alternative. A shirt that said we root for each other would be a lie in most workplaces, most families, most streets. A shirt that says let’s is asking a question. It is the same tense as let’s have a cup of tea or let’s get the bus. It is ordinary, provisional, and slightly hopeful. It does not demand that you already feel it. It just suggests that you might.
The vegetables, meanwhile, are not asking. They are already rooted. They are already growing. They are already smiling, in that way that illustrated vegetables do, which is to say: not because they are happy, but because someone drew them that way. The smile is a convention. The roots are a fact. And the fact is that they are all in the same soil, drawing on the same nutrients, and none of them is going to get very far without the others. That is not sentimentality. That is horticulture.
I do not know who this shirt is for. I suspect it is for someone who has an allotment, or a window box, or a friend who has been having a hard time. I suspect it is for someone who likes the idea of mutual support but would rather not say it out loud, and has found a way to say it in a pun about root vegetables. That is a very British kind of communication: the feeling is real, but it is wearing a novelty t-shirt. The shirt is available here, if you want to read the whole thing for yourself.
What I keep coming back to, in the end, is the soil. The drawing shows the roots in the ground, which means it shows the part that is usually invisible. And that, I think, is the real argument of the shirt: that the important part of growing is the part nobody sees. The carrot does not grow because it is watched. It grows because it is rooted. The watching is a bonus. The rooting is the thing.
So the shirt is a pun, and a nice one, and it is also a small diagram of how to be with other people. You put down roots. You stay in the same soil. You let the leafy part be visible and the root part be private. And you watch each other grow, not because growth is the point, but because it is what happens when you are rooted in the same place. The vegetables are smiling because someone drew them that way. But they are also smiling because they are together, in the dark, doing the work.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.