AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
This summer, Mother Nature has decided to put on a rare show in the Rocky Mountains. A very special wildflower, the green gentians, are in a major super bloom in the alpine meadows of Colorado. But these blooms are hard-won. The gentians grow for decades and bloom briefly. Then they die, never to bloom again. David Inouye is a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. He's been studying green gentians since the '70s, and he joins us now. Welcome, David.
DAVID INOUYE: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
RASCOE: So take me back to 1973. There was a green gentian bloom like this one that caused you to start studying these flowers. What did you see?
INOUYE: Well, some previous work that had been done here on these gentians, they found lots and lots of plants in one year, and then they came back to study them the next year, and there were almost no flowering plants. And Chip Taylor from the University of Kansas and I decided that we would try and discover what it was that created this kind of off-year and then on-year flowering pattern. And we started tagging several hundred plants in 1973 that we could come back and find again. And I've kept that study going now since 1973. So some of the plants that we're following, we've been looking at for over 50 years, and some of those plants have still not yet flowered up at the...
RASCOE: Oh, wow.
INOUYE: ...Higher altitudes.
RASCOE: Wow. They still haven't flowered over 50 years?
INOUYE: That's right. And in, see, 1982, I planted some seeds, and the first one to flower was 20 years later in 2003. And then after 40 years, I think all of them have finally flowered and died.
RASCOE: Why do they take so long to bloom? Like, what are they doing all that time?
INOUYE: They're stirring up energy in a root underground. And then in the last year of their life, they use all that energy to put this big flower stalk up. On average, the plants are, oh, about 5 feet tall, although I have seen them as tall as 9 feet tall. If you think about it, a plant that only has one chance in its life to flower and it wants to attract pollinators, wants to make itself conspicuous. And so one way it does that is to make sure that it sticks up higher than the surrounding vegetation.
RASCOE: Since they take so long to grow, how do you know when they're going to bloom?
INOUYE: Well, it turns out that these plants do something called preformation. They actually start making their leaves four years before those leaves appear above ground, and that means that they're also preforming their flower stalks. So I think what's happening is if we have an unusually wet summer, that triggers some of these plants to stop making leaves underground and start making the beginning of a flower stalk. Last summer was quite a dry summer. I know that four years from last summer is not going to be a good flowering year. That also means that if a climate is changing and becoming drier, these flowering events are going to be happening less frequently. It's been seven years since the last one, and those intervals between these big super blooms could start becoming longer and longer as the climate dries out.
RASCOE: That's David Inouye, a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Thank you so much.
INOUYE: You're quite welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE HIP ABDUCTION'S "ALPINE FLOWERS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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