rootage
rooting

Some drifts of soil there gave rootage to small bushes and grass.

It had a pointed roof of some rough material, dull under the sun, and gave rootage in places to vines, even a small tree.

The tree's rootage should be exposed at the base of the trunk and should flare wider than the trunk as it enters the ground.

For Compson, the rootage he unearthed explained the South: its moldy gothicism, its convoluted rage.

But across the lake the yellow and red of trees in fall leaf showed, and a green line along the shore as if it gave rootage to reeds.

The small leaf is in excellent scale for bonsai and the tree has good branch ramification, good basal rootage and excellent aerial root formation."

Before me the Waste was a long tongue of gray rock, giving rootage only to sparse and twisted brush, so misshapen in its growing that it might well have been attacked by some creeping evil.

I had fought my way up a steep rise where the rock bones of the land had pushed through soil which grew thinner until it only lay in pockets, sometimes enough to give rootage to coarse grass or wind-twisted bushes.

"A man's rootage is more important than his leafage," Woodrow Wilson once said, a sentiment no better amplified in fiction than by William Faulkner, who plumbed many of Davidson's concerns in "Absalom, Absalom!"