This paper explores images of plant life in the history of western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky in pursuit of the question of what we can learn about the nature of the human being and its place in the world from plants and the way they are rooted in earth. Over the last half-century many voices identify our disconnection from the earth with the centrality of technological progress, capitalist production, industrialization and globalization that are essential to our modern self-understanding and way of life. What was supposed to be the root of human distinction has ended up uprooting us. Is this because we have a distorted view of what it means to be rooted in the first place, and our dependency on the rootedness of plant life? This paper draws on contemporary plant studies  to interrogate western plant imaginaries in view of developing an idea of human life as deeply embedded in both earthly and planetary life.