system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does irradiation work for non-humans? (Trees, for example)

I watched Chernobyl by HBO and have some basic understanding of what radiation poisoning does to human cell structure. But what about plants? Why does the Red Forest still exist? Why there are grass and, probably, flowers all around the nuclear plant?
gpt
So the way radiation works in basically every creature is that it's the cells that are currently being born that are the most heavily affected.

In animals new cells are constantly being born, and then those cells travel all throughout the body to go to work. So with radiation what happens is those cells end up all over the place and damaging all your systems, liver, lungs, everything and then once those systems are damaged there is very little your body can do to recover from that. If you liver fails you die. If your lungs fail you die.

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For plants the exact same damage happens, in that their newly born cells get damaged. But plants have a few things working for them. First off, their cells don't travel all through the body in the same way, new cells get born right where they are needed. This means the damage stays localized. Secondly, unlike animals plant are a lot more redundant. Has a root completely died? Simple, don't use that root. Has a giant tumor grown around it's trunk? Reroute nutrients around it.  So even if they do get damaged they rarely die from it. It's more like getting a scar for a person, it's annoying but we will be fine given enough time. 

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Currently living cells get affected too, but it's usually not the biggest danger outside of *extreme* levels of radiation that kill you basically instantly. Even in this case plant cells have something called a cell wall around each and every cell, which helps protect against radiation a bit in the first place.