bamboo| A mysterious plant that blooms and dies

Although bamboo is a common plant, it is indeed a magical plant. With close relatives rice, wheat is both herbaceous plants, but can grow one meter a night, and eventually as tall as a big tree, but also can form a majestic and pure bamboo sea. Its unique flowering habit is also a mystery in plant research.

In fact, not many people have seen bamboo blossom, so that many people think that bamboo does not blossom at all. Until the 1980s, arrow bamboo forests in Sichuan, Gansu and other places bloomed in large areas, and then bamboo all over the mountains died at the same time, causing a sensation, putting a mysterious veil on bamboo.

Of course, bamboo, as an angiosperm, has to blossom and bear seeds and reproduce. It's just that it doesn't blossom every year like other plants. There is a 60-year law in academic circles, that is, it blossoms every 60 years, but this is only a rough number. When bamboo blossoms is closely related to environmental changes and its own age.

Bamboo flowering can have a huge impact that other plants do not have: overnight, bamboo dies in pieces, causing a wide range of ecological events, affecting other creatures such as pandas that depend on bamboo, and dealing a heavy blow to the human bamboo industry.

Why does bamboo die after it blossoms?

Flowering plants in nature can be roughly divided into two categories, one only blossoms once in a lifetime, and the other is more common, blooming year after year and repeating, such as apples, peonies, sweet-scented osmanthus and so on. The life of the former is divided into vegetative growth and reproductive growth, early vegetative growth: Shu branch and leaf expansion, accumulation of nutrients; after a period of time, flowers begin to bloom, reproduce, and then die when the nutrients are exhausted. The same is true of the plants we usually see in 2012, such as radish, cabbage and rape. On the other hand, Dong Brown, which produces Simi, as well as tequila, bamboo and other plants, will spend decades accumulating nutrients, burst out, and then die. (note: not all bamboo will die after flowering. Phyllostachys pubescens, Phyllostachys pubescens and so on will still survive.)

Since bamboo is not the only one who dies after flowering, why is it that only bamboo will die in large areas and become a sensation?

The large bamboo forest we see is probably the same bamboo, which are all connected by bamboo whips underground. Bamboo shoots grow on the bamboo whip, and grow into new bamboo, constantly expanding the scope, which is similar to the "single tree forest"! The bamboo forest formed in this way is also called "peer bamboo". Even if it is not the same bamboo, the same kind of bamboo in a geographical area may all be the offspring of the last bamboo blooming and dying in a large area. All in all, they are of the same age and form a cycle in nature, just like 17-year-old cicadas are collectively unearthed and shelled every 17 years. A series of unique habits made this spectacle!

Compared with the "same age bamboo" in nature, artificially planted bamboo often varies in variety, age and origin, forming "different age bamboo", so that there will be no collective flowering and death.