For years, I have been torn by a constant pressure to add more â detailâ to our cellular models of plant development while also being driven to capture the essence of a phenomenon. I hope to illustrate this conundrum by a case-study on plant development and nutrient uptake. Through modelling and mathematical analysis and combined with experimental verifications, I will show how 1) very fast temporal cellular responses are critical for maintaining steady-state tissue-level behaviour, even in the absence of external variation; and 2) how sub-cellular spatial compartments, such as the cell wall, enable tissue-scale patterns to arise that are fundamentally distinct from what is possible without these sub-cellular features. We were only able to achieve these insights by capturing certain â detailsâ within multilevel cellular models, only later realising their true significance. Nevertheless, the mechanisms, relying on detailed spatial and temporal structures in a multi-level setting, yielded parsimonious explanations.