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As title, what condition could prevent plant growth from below a planet surface?
I've considered considered removing all water from the planet, both underground and above the surface, but that doesn't feel right.
Is there any other way to completely prevent any kind of flora from growing even with abundance of water sources?

Given long enough timescales some lifeforms will exploit your limitations and thrive right on those constraints.

Not a solution, but a very efficient species of snails, which eat anything not snail-like, could prevent plans from growing for a long time. They would adapt to eat btw Alexis of plants, and could overcome protective mechanisms that the plants would develop. However, such a system is not perfect, and it would allow for some plans to exist at any given time. Thus the only downside is that the equilibrium is somewhere in the region of "few plants" and "many many snails".

Thoughts:

• Magma, lots of Magma. In essence the "surface" is very thin, perhaps 2-3 metres. There isn't soil, just basalt's and other igneous rocks. The rocks are warm to hot all the time.




• The planet is solid, no liquid iron belt protecting the planet from radiation. Sure as anything this will kill a planet. Just look at mars.

A simple solution would be to make the soil uninhabitable to organics due to some chemical. If this was intentional, by some advanced species, they could simply place a strong acid or poison in the ground. If this was part of the planet's nature, it could happen by the soil being incredibly acidic, dissolving most organisms before they can develop.

As title, what condition could prevent plant growth from below a planet surface?

Classically plants thrive on a process known as photosynthesis - they use energy from the sun's light in order to convert carbon and water into carbohydrates, and from there they get their energy.

Also classically the underground is a dark place that gets no sunlight^{[citation needed]}. That should be enough to keep plants from growin in there.

Perhaps there isn't enough topsoil to support the growth of new plant life. This was an issue on our own planet after the end of the ice age, as moving glaciers scoured large areas as they melted in areas such as northern Canada, removing the topsoil that had existed there previously. Other examples of topsoil-removing events include high winds, abnormally heavy rainfall, and exposure to intense heat and/or radiation. So long as an event such as this occurs at a regular interval, substantial plant life should be unable to grow.

If the soil contains (for whatever reason) no magnesium, then any life that existed couldn't make chlorophyll as we know it, which means no plants.

You could also try some kind of other organism that out-competes the plants, like a soil microbe that uses up resources instead of making them available.

An occasional catastrophic rad-blast would also do the trick.