Mechanisms causing root death

[isurus79]

Originally Posted by Ray

Another significant factor in root death, in hot-growing plants especially, is letting them get too cold when wet. Cold is bad enough, but also being wet seems to be much worse. I haven’t given the mechanism of that much thought, but just try to avoid it.

I've always wondered if hot growing species with strong dormancy (e.g. Catasetums) actually shut down their disease fighting mechanisms along with everything else while they're "asleep." The cold and wet could just facilitate microbial blooms and the lack of disease fighting mechanisms inside the plant permit infection. And yes, I'm totally making this up with no scientific evidence for this hypothesis whatsoever.