Phosphorus (P) is essential for life and increasingly central to the challenges of agricultural sustainability and water quality. In Chapter 1, I examine the potential for phytoremediation to conserve soil phosphorus in landscapes vulnerable to leaching. While plants are often assumed to stabilize phosphorus simply by removing it in biomass, our findings suggest that plant traits influencing phosphorus solubilization and infiltration — particularly in species selected for erosion control — can inadvertently accelerate losses. Chapter 2 turns to the microbial scale, investigating how plants at low latitudes may engage root and rhizosphere fungi, including opportunistic pathogens, to access phosphorus. Here, microbial competition for iron emerges as a potential future avenue to explore P acquisition in nutrient-poor soils.In Chapter 3, I evaluate a three-year field trial testing plant-based remediation at landscape scale. Although vegetation reduces surface runoff and exports phosphorus, little surface soil change is observed. Instead, seasonal flooding appeared to remobilize a cryptic supply of deep soil P, bringing this P to the surface and potentially out to ditches via subsurface flow. Chapter 4 frames these ‘podzols’ – soils where podzolization has occurred – as natural laboratories for studying phosphorus limitation over long timescales. In these stratified soils, the vertical separation of organic and mineral phosphorus pools reveals how plants adapt to ecosystems where nutrient access is shaped by geological and biogeochemical legacies.