An annual, except for every x years where x is greater than 1. Or am I missing something? Why is this interesting? Many plants only bloom once before dying.

Edit: for those of you unfamiliar with the term, an annual only blooms once a year before dying. This is opposed to a perennial.

It is of interest because these palms only bloom once in their entire lifetime and then they perish. This has relevance to us all, because it’s literally a once in a lifetime event, and a beautiful one at that. Imagine spending your entire life storing energy for your one and only act of reproduction, and then dying.

Plants are beautiful systems, and for those of us who pay attention there are is lots of beauty in the way they work.

The biggest thing is the spectacle of the flowers themselves, and the reflection on time passing for humans given by such a long time span between when the palm is planted and when this spectacle can be observed.

There's also the spectacle of seeing so many once in 40-80 years blooms happen at once - which the article doesn't touch on, but is an awe-inspiring look into how regular biology can be, despite us thinking of it as messy and random. You'd tend to think that over such a long timespan, the trees would get "de-synchronized". Of course, that wouldn't make sense evolutionarily - they almost certainly need to all bloom at once to have a good chance of reproduction. But getting a biological process to happen 80 years from now on the same day/week for dozens(?) of trees across a park is a marvel in itself.

The general term for plants that set seed once is monocarp. Most famously agave and bamboo, among plants with cycles longer than two years.

For plants like bamboos, they're interesting because the periods can be quite long, over a hundred years in some cases, so it's simply rare to see them in flower, and due to how they're propagated and how they keep time, you sometimes see a mass worldwide flowering and die off followed by a shortage of that plant.

It's a much rarer reproductive strategy than annual, biennial, or perennial.

There was some math joke that zero, one and infinity were OK, but the rest of the natural numbers were weird and hard to justify ...

> Its most striking, and at the same time most dramatic, feature is that it is a monocarpic species: It only blooms once, at the end of its life, and then it dies.This moment can occur between 40 and 80 years of age, depending on climatic conditions, soil type, and the amount of sunlight the plant has received over the decades. All of the plant's energy is then concentrated into a single reproductive burst.

Not annual, only once