SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 187 



plant feels itself in a position to send up a flower- 

 ing stalk, which is formed from the materials al- 

 ready laid by in these immensely thick and richly- 

 stored leaf bases. The stalk springs from the 

 middle of the central leaf-sheath. In a very few 

 weeks the agave has sent up from this point a 

 huge flowering scape, twenty or thirty feet high, 

 and a foot or fifteen inches thick at the bottom. 

 On this scape it produces with extraordinary ra- 

 pidity a vast number of large and showy yellow 

 flowers, which look not unlike an enormous can- 

 delabrum, with many divided branches. The plant 

 is enabled to produce this immense flowering stem 

 and these numerous flowers in so short a period, 

 because it draws upon its large store of elaborated 

 material for the purpose. But as the flowering 

 stem rises, and the flowers unfold, and the big 

 fruits and seeds develop and ripen, the leaves be- 

 low grow gradually flaccid and empty ; and their 

 bases shrink, being depleted of their store of valu- 

 able food-stuffs ; so that by the time the seeds are 

 ripe, the whole plant is used up, having exhausted 

 itself, like the tiny whitlow-grass, in the act of 

 fruiting. It then dies down altogether, and never 

 recovers, though new plants or offsets usually de- 

 velop at its base from side buds, after the original 

 agave has begun to wither. In English hothouses 

 it takes thirty or forty years before the agave has 

 collected enough material to send up a stem and 

 flower; hence the common exaggeration that it 

 needs a hundred years for " the blossoming of an 

 aloe." 



As a familiar example of a very different kind 

 of perennial plant, we may take our English beech- 

 tree. The beech sets out in life as a tender young 

 seedling, which grows from a good-sized triangular 



