These plants wait their whole lives to bloom once. It's usually spectacular

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These plants wait their whole lives to bloom once. It's usually spectacular

2024-07-23 19:35 Last Updated At：19:41

Flowering annuals generally bloom nonstop before dying at the end of the year or season. Perennials return every year, providing either season-long color, a burst of blossoms followed by sporadic blooming or a limited show that can last as little as two weeks. And biennials flower only in their second year before calling it quits.

But there’s another group of plants called monocarpics that spend their whole lives growing in size only to provide a single, swan-song bloom before leaving us for the great compost pile in the sky.

Some monocarpic plants, whose name is derived from the Greek for single (“mono”) and fruit (“carpos”), have a cult following among a subset of gardeners who revel in what can be years of anticipation, often throwing parties to display their plant’s once-in-a-lifetime death bloom.

Others growers, however, can be caught off guard to discover their 30-year-old landscape plant unexpectedly blooming, only to watch it die immediately afterward.

Flowers, of course, have a purpose: to ensure the posterity of their species. After their bloom concludes, plants produce seeds to ensure future generations, which completes their mission. Monocarpic plants have just one shot at this, so, as you might imagine, the effort is often spectacular.

Take the century plant (Agave americana), whose name is the poster child for hyperbole. Rather than living for 100 years, as its name suggests, the desert plant native to Mexico and Texas and hardy in zones 8-11 has an average lifespan of just 10 to 30 years. During this time, it grows to about 6 feet tall before sending up a giant flower stalk that can reach 30 feet, frequently shocking its owners. News coverage often ensues.

A 19-year-old American columbo (Frasera caroliniensis) growing at the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill bloomed to local fanfare this spring. The unique plants native to the eastern and central United States grow in foot-tall clumps for many years before pushing forth a 6-to-8-foot spike of green, purple-speckled flowers.

Typically sturdy, resilient and drought-tolerant, the monocarpic plant category also includes fishtail palm (Caryota spp.), which can be grown outdoors in zones 9b-10. Capable of exceeding 50 feet in height, the trees produce hanging panicles of beautiful magenta flowers with yellow centers when they are between 10 and 20 years old. The good news is the show can last up to 5 years, after which only the blooming trunk will die, leaving secondary trunks, if present, to take over. Fishtail palms grown as houseplants are not likely to bloom.

Bamboo, the bane of many gardeners’ existence, is also a monocarpic plant. But don’t count on its bloom to end its invasiveness: It can take more than 100 years for some bamboo species to flower, and even then, sometimes their rhizomatous roots push up new plants.

Bananas, too, are monocarpic, but they reproduce by sending up suckers, or small plants, from their roots. After their one-and-only fruit crop is harvested, the main plant is cut to ground level, leaving the suckers to take over.

Sempervivum, a genus of succulents commonly called “hens and chicks” or “house leeks,” are hardy in zones 4-8. They grow in 6-inch-tall, tight rosettes and multiply by producing a growing brood of smaller rosettes, which in turn make their own. The offshoots, or “chicks,” can be carefully removed from the mother plant, or “hen,” and planted elsewhere, or be left to spread into a mass planting. It takes roughly three to four years for a mother to sprout an eye-catching, 8-inch-tall stalk bearing a star-shaped flower at its tip before dying. Chicks, however, will continue on their own life paths.

And Aechmea fasciata, a popular bromeliad houseplant often called “urn plant,” will also bloom just once — at around age 3 — studding their stunning, spiked pink bracts with tiny purple blossoms to complement their strappy, silvery-green leaves. As with the others, the mother then surrenders her life, allowing the babies she produces to carry on the family tradition.

Ah, the circle of life.

Jessica Damiano writes weekly gardening columns for the AP and publishes the award-winning Weekly Dirt Newsletter. You can sign up here for weekly gardening tips and advice.

For more AP gardening stories, go to https://apnews.com/hub/gardening.

Trump appeals to voters in Wisconsin GOP stronghold ahead of debate with Harris

2024-09-08 04:08 Last Updated At：04:11

MOSINEE, Wis. (AP) — With just days to go before his first — and likely only — debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump leaned into his familiar grievances about everything from his indictments and efforts to keep him off the ballot as he campaigned in one of the most deeply Republican swaths of battleground Wisconsin.

“The Harris-Biden DOJ is trying to throw me in jail — they want me in jail — for the crime of exposing their corruption,” Trump claimed at an outdoor rally at Central Wisconsin Airport, where he spoke behind a wall of bullet-proof glass following his July assassination attempt.

There's no evidence that either Biden or Harris have had any influence over decisions by the Justice Department or local jurisdictions to indict Trump.

The former president was speaking a day after appearing in court for an appeal of a decision that found him liable for sexual abuse, returning attention to his many indictments and criminal conviction. After his appearance, he delivered a lengthy statement to news cameras in which he brought up a string of past allegations of other acts of sexual misconduct — at times in graphic language — potentially reminding voters of incidents that were little-known or forgotten.

Hours later, a Manhattan judge announced that the sentencing in his hush money case had been postponed until after the November election, granting him a hard-won reprieve. The sentencing had previously been scheduled for Sept. 18, about seven weeks before Election Day.

At the rally, Trump again criticized Harris in dark and ominous language, claiming that if the woman he calls “Comrade Kamala Harris gets four more years, we will be living in a full-blown Banana Republic ruled by anarchy.”

He also railed against the Biden administration's border policies, calling the Democrats' approach “suicidal.”

Both Harris and Trump have been frequent visitors to Wisconsin this year, a state where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point. Several polls of Wisconsin voters conducted after President Joe Biden withdrew showed Harris and Trump in a close race.

The crowd in Mosinee was greeted by a big screen video of Trump urging attendees to check their voter registration and make a plan for voting.

“If we swamp them, they can’t cheat,” Trump said, continuing to raise unfounded concerns about voter fraud, which is extremely rare.

Democrats consider Wisconsin to be one of the must-win “blue wall” states. Biden, who was in Wisconsin on Thursday, won the state in 2020 by just under 21,000 votes. Trump carried it by a slightly larger margin, nearly 23,000 votes, in 2016.

As Trump was campaigning, Harris took a short break from debate prep on Saturday to stop at Penzeys Spices in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, where she bought a number of seasoning mixes. One customer saw the Democratic nominee and began openly weeping as Harris hugged her and said, “We’re going to be fine. We’re all in this together.”

Harris said she was honored to have endorsements from two major Republicans: former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman.

“People are exhausted, about the division and the attempts to kind of divide us as Americans,” she said, adding that her main message at the debate would be that the country wants to be united.

“It’s time to turn the page on the divisiveness,” she said. “It’s time to bring our country together, to chart a new way forward.”

Trump held his rally in the central Wisconsin city of Mosinee, with a population of about 4,500 people. It is within Wisconsin's mostly rural 7th Congressional District, a reliably Republican area in a purple state. Trump carried the county where Mosinee is located by 18 percentage points in both 2016 and 2020.

Among those in the crowd was Dale Osuldsen, who was celebrating his 68th birthday Saturday at his first ever Trump rally. He hopes a second Trump administration will take on “cancel culture” and bring the country back to its “foundational past.

“We’ve had past administrations say they want to fundamentally change America,” Osulden said. “Fundamentally changing America is a bad thing.”

Democrats have relied on massive turnout in the state's two largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, to counter Republican strength in rural areas like Mosinee and the Milwaukee suburbs. Trump must win the votes in places like Mosinee to have any chance of cutting into the Democrats' advantage in urban areas.

Republicans held their national convention in Milwaukee in July and Trump has made four previous stops to the state, most recently just last week in the western Wisconsin city of La Crosse.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, last month filled the same Milwaukee arena where Republicans held their national convention for a rally that coincided with the Democratic National Convention just 90 miles away in Chicago. Walz returned Monday to Milwaukee, where he spoke at a Labor Day rally organized by unions.

Bauer reported from Madison. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York and Josh Boak in Pittsburgh contributed to this report from New York.