This week, while reading a book, I stumbled upon a wild and beautiful phenomenon I had never heard of before. I want to share about that, but first, here’s a detail you need to know: Bamboo plants can be easily cloned by cutting shoots and replanting them in other places.
And… no matter how far these clones are spread apart — all over the world, in fact — they can blossom and then die at the exact same time. This is not dependent on how long they’ve been going in the ground. A new shoot from a 120 year old plant that lives on its own for a year will blossom and die at the same time the initial plant does.
And bamboo plants don’t blossom regularly. Depending on the species, flowering may occur only once every several decades—or even more than a century. Some species flower at intervals approaching 120 years. It’s as if there is an inherent timer in the genetics. It’s a beautiful mystery.
I’d like to share a quote from the book I was reading. In Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, Linda Hogan writes,
“There are other summons and calls, some even more mysterious than those commandments to birds or plants, for instance, with their thin green canopy of light and golden stalks that creak in the wind. Once a century, all of a certain kind of bamboo flower on the same day. Neither the plants’ location, in Malaysia or in a greenhouse in Minnesota, nor their age or size make a difference. They flower. Some current of an inner language passes along them, through space and separation, in ways we cannot explain in our language. They are all, somehow, one plant, each with a share of communal knowledge.” (Pg. 157)
After reading that, I wanted to learn more, so Google and I became friends on this.
If you’d like to hear a historical account of one of these flowering events, feel free to watch the short video below.
Smuggling Grace 