Tree roots do more than simply anchor a tree to the soil. They struggle against it, adapt to it, and, over time, transform it. From this perspective, Vincent van Gogh’s Tree Roots, painted in the final days of his life, becomes more than a depiction of nature. It invites us to reflect on the ancient relationship between life and its environment.
Vincent van Gogh’s 1890 painting Tree Roots does not confront us with a landscape in the conventional sense.
There is almost no horizon. The sky has disappeared. There is no distant perspective toward which the eye can escape.
Instead, roots, trunks, leaves, and soil spread across the entire canvas, entangled with one another. The roots twist, change direction, cross over and under each other, and emerge here and there from the earth.
After looking at the painting for a while, a question almost inevitably arises:
Are these roots holding on to the soil, or struggling against it?
Roots and Soil
For a soil scientist, the relationship between roots and soil is remarkably complex.
A root seeks to grow, but the soil it must advance through is neither homogeneous nor unrestricted.
There is mechanical resistance.
There are stones.
There are pores of different sizes and degrees of continuity.
Water and oxygen are distributed unevenly.
The root must find its way through this heterogeneous world. Sometimes it follows a larger pore; sometimes it enters a crack. At other times, it bends around an obstacle. Where conditions are favorable, it branches; when conditions change, it changes direction.
The shape of a root, therefore, is not accidental.
In a sense, the form of a root tells the story of the soil in which it has lived.
When we return to Van Gogh’s painting with this perspective, its twisted, intertwined, and partially exposed roots begin to acquire another meaning.
We are no longer looking merely at botanical structures. We are looking at traces left by a living organism trying to survive within the constraints and opportunities of its environment.
Yet the Struggle Is Not One-Sided
Soil shapes the root.
But the root also changes the soil.
Growing roots influence soil pore architecture. When roots die and decompose, the channels they leave behind may become biopores through which water, air, and future roots can move. Root exudates, together with the intense microbial activity of the rhizosphere, contribute to aggregation and influence the physical structure of the soil.
What initially appears to be a struggle therefore gradually reveals itself as something more complex:
Mutual transformation.
The soil resists the root, and the root adapts to that resistance.
The root uses pathways provided by the soil, but over time it also creates new pathways.
The soil changes the root, while the root changes the soil.
Perhaps this is why many relationships in nature cannot adequately be understood through the idea of “struggle” alone.
Life is often less about defeating the environment than about developing the capacity to live within it.
What Did Van Gogh See in Roots?
We should, of course, be cautious when attempting to reconstruct an artist’s intentions.
We cannot claim that all the meanings we perceive today in the 1890 Tree Roots were consciously placed there by Van Gogh.
Yet we possess an extraordinary clue.
Approximately eight years earlier, Van Gogh had already been drawing tree roots.
In a letter written to his brother Theo from The Hague on 1 May 1882, he described working on roots embedded in sandy ground. He wrote of trees partly torn from the earth by a storm, yet still gripping the soil with tremendous force.
He then explained what he had hoped to express through the image:
“I wanted to express something of life’s struggle.”
What makes this observation even more significant is that Van Gogh did not present this struggle merely as a philosophical symbolism imposed upon nature. He suggested that, by trying to remain faithful to nature, something of that great struggle entered the image almost of its own accord.
For Van Gogh, then, roots were already more than botanical structures.
Roots were also images of holding on.
Eight Years Later, a Return to the Roots
In the summer of 1890, Van Gogh was living in Auvers-sur-Oise.
And during the final days of his life, he returned once more to tree roots.
According to research by the Van Gogh Museum, Tree Roots was probably the final work he painted, on the morning of 27 July 1890. Parts of the canvas appear unfinished.
Later that day, Van Gogh suffered the gunshot wound from which he would die two days later, on 29 July, with his brother Theo at his side.
Knowing this inevitably changes the way we look at Tree Roots.
Yet there is a danger in taking an easy interpretive path.
To see the painting simply as “the final painting of a man about to take his own life” may actually diminish its meaning.
For Van Gogh’s own words tell us that roots could represent not only rupture, but also the act of holding on.
And this leaves us with a far more difficult question:
Where is the boundary between holding on to the soil and being torn away from it?
The Soil Is Not the Enemy
We may describe a root’s movement through soil as a struggle.
The soil imposes mechanical resistance. It restricts the pathways available for growth. The distribution of water and oxygen determines where the root can function effectively.
Yet there is a paradox.
The very soil against which the root struggles is also what sustains it.
Water is there.
Nutrients are there.
Microorganisms are there.
And the physical medium that allows the tree to stand is there as well.
The root depends upon the very thing that resists it.
Perhaps this is one of the most powerful ideas that Tree Roots can invite us to consider.
Life does not always become possible because obstacles disappear. Sometimes life takes form precisely through the adaptations an organism develops in response to those obstacles.
A root bending around an obstruction is not a failure.
It is finding another way forward.
Branching is not indecision.
It is exploration for water and nutrients.
Entering a crack is not accidental.
It is taking advantage of an opportunity offered by the surrounding environment.
The present form of a root therefore contains traces of the environmental conditions it has encountered in the past.
Root morphology is, in this sense, a memory of the environment in which the root has lived.
Soil, Too, Has a Memory
As soil scientists, we actually do something very similar when we examine a soil profile.
When we open a soil pit, we are not looking only at the soil as it exists today.
Through horizons, colours, aggregates, root channels, clay accumulations, carbonates, and other pedogenic features, we attempt to reconstruct processes that occurred in the past.
Soil, in a sense, stores its own history.
Climate, organisms, parent material, topography, and time leave traces within its morphology.
There is therefore more similarity than we might initially imagine between the exposed roots of an old tree and a soil profile.
Both are records of time.
One records how life has responded to its environment; the other records how the environment itself has changed through time.
And, of course, the two cannot truly be separated.
Are Humans Like Roots?
At this point, Van Gogh’s painting begins to move beyond botany and soil science and toward the human condition.
Human beings do not live in a vacuum either.
We are born into a geography.
We grow within a society, a culture, and a history.
Economic conditions, family, education, climate, place, and the historical period in which we live all shape our possibilities and limitations.
Much like the soil surrounding a root.
Yet humans are not merely passive products of their environments.
We also change them.
We create new pathways.
We leave behind opportunities—and sometimes obstacles—for those who come after us.
The relationship between human beings and their environment may therefore resemble the relationship between root and soil:
The environment shapes us, and we, in turn, shape the environment.
Perhaps this is why it is insufficient to understand human life simply as a struggle against external conditions.
The deeper challenge may not be to defeat the environment, but to find a way to live within it.
The Final Morning
In 2020, researchers studying an old postcard identified what is believed to be the location in Auvers-sur-Oise where Van Gogh painted Tree Roots. By comparing the painting with a postcard dating from around 1900–1910 and with the present-day hillside, the Van Gogh Museum concluded that the identification was highly probable.
The discovery makes the painting even more affecting.
The roots before us were not merely symbols invented in Van Gogh’s imagination.
They were there.
At the side of a road.
Van Gogh stood before them.
He looked at them.
And he began to paint.
It is difficult not to reflect on the fact that an artist who, eight years earlier, had seen in tree roots something of “life’s struggle” returned to roots during the final days of his own life.
But we do not know what Van Gogh was thinking as he painted them.
Perhaps he remembered the roots he had drawn in 1882.
Perhaps he did not.
Perhaps he was thinking about his own life.
Or perhaps he simply saw an extraordinary arrangement of colours, forms, and lines before him.
We can never know with certainty.
And perhaps we do not need to.
Great works of art sometimes matter not because they provide answers, but because they leave us with questions that continue to unfold.
Tree Roots may be one of those works.
When we look at soil, do we see an obstacle—or the medium that makes life possible?
Is the root struggling against the soil, or living together with it?
Perhaps there is no need to choose between the two.
The root struggles against the soil while simultaneously holding on to it. The soil constrains the root while also nourishing it. And as the root searches for a path, it gradually transforms the soil through which it moves.
Perhaps life is much the same: finding a path through the world that constrains us, holding on to it, and, in passing, changing it a little.
References and Further Reading
Van Gogh, V. (1882). Letter 222: To Theo van Gogh, The Hague, 1 May 1882. Vincent van Gogh – The Letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens Institute.
Van Gogh Museum. Tree Roots, 1890. Collection and research information, Amsterdam.
Van Gogh Museum. (2020). Annual Report 2020. Research concerning the identification of the location depicted in Tree Roots.
Van Gogh Museum. Van Gogh in Auvers: His Final Months. Research and exhibition materials concerning Van Gogh’s final period in Auvers-sur-Oise.