[hinkley]

I buy bare root plants because tree nurseries repot their seedlings too late, after the roots had already begun circling the pot. The worst one I ever saw had three layers of circling roots. I got it at my favorite froo-froo gardening center. I took it back and showed their plant buyer. He said that's normal. The fuck it is.

Bare root plants never have this problem.

There is definitely a tendency of trees to behave as if they are in a pot when they encounter a huge change in soil medium. The dead tree I dug up this spring had virtually no roots outside of the original cone section of the pot it came in.

The other problem, especially with bushes, is they often put those little plastic time release fertilizer beads into their soil mix and so I'm putting microplastic into my yard. Often the roots are too fibrous to get all of the beads. I sometimes get the smaller plants because of this.

I don't actually 'wash' though, I use a chopstick to tease the dirt away from the roots. They're still coated.

[tastyfreeze]

I recently received a camellia sinensis (tea plant) from a nursery that was root bound. That wasn't much of an issue. The problem I has was the nursery was required to drench the soil in bifentrhin pesticide. First thing out of the box is a warning to wear gloves and keep kids and animals away from the root zone. No thank you. I have been cultivating an environment for the critters in my yard. I regularly have frogs, toads, birds and occasional deer and bear in my yard. No pesticides allowed! In this case I did wash the roots and repotted in my home soil mix.

Bare root plants do sometimes have issues getting started but I will only be ordering seed or bare root from now on.