I have a city garden (see picture below) and yesterday I was nurturing it and I pulled up a small plant. I saw its root system and laid it in the sun to dry a bit and then scraped of the rest of the earth from it. That gave me a better look at the roots. 

Then the question appeared to me. How do roots obtain water and nutrition from their environment. I mean what structures are we dealing with and how does the uptake take place? 

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/godoC.jpg)