To fully understand the making and meaning of an early modern botanical or medical theory concerning roots and plants, the historian can grasp their symbolic and folkloric stories. This cultural dimension of the underground plant serves as a comprehensive tool for writing a natural history of plants such as Mandrake or Deadly nightshade. The description of their harvest is often a narrative topos used in herbals to foster devotion, faith, and morality, as remedies of the Renaissance pharmacopeia to some specific illnesses, particularly those related to sexuality, fertility, melancholy, and madness. Thus, the “underground” plant is linked to the “underworld”, through the axis mundi imagery, the root being the bridge with the mundus subterraneus (a reversed world). The act of digging the soil is structured with magical rituals and gestures around the roots, rhizomes or tubers which are dedicated to ward off threats related to death or evil spirits. This paper introduces one of the chapters in my Ph.D. thesis. Therefore, it is, by definition, an embryo of my Ph.D. thesis and the sources that it presents are still incomplete. As a historian, I have written this paper rather to explore the theoretical base of my forthcoming critical analysis of the sources. The period considered for this paper runs over a long timeframe in the early modern European society, from the early 16th century to the end of the 17th century. RSA Virtual 2021