Now that I have a better understanding of what a perennial plant is, I want to know what enables its extended life cycle. My first search online yielded a bunch of home and garden pages (I wonder if that's partially because Google knows I've done more home and garden reading than science reading in the past?).
I found two explanations to begin:
One was on Live Science and it explained the strategies of annual and perennial plants in a basic way. Since the site is made to be like a news site and easily accessible to the average reader, it used pretty simple language, which I appreciated. The thing I found most strange is that it presented annual plants as ones that flower and go to seed to reproduce, and implied that this strategy was much different from perennials that focus their energy into producing hardy buds, bulbs or tubers. Most of the perennial plants I have grown flower though, so this explanation felt like it left out a lot of complexity. Interestingly, the point of the article is about how scientists have figured out the genetic difference between annuals and perennials which enabled them to genetically modify annuals to become perennials.
The second explanation I found was on Wikipedia. As predictable as that sounds, I was very impressed with the article because it was quite technical and well supported with quality resources. I started with an article on the evolution of annual and perennial plants, then went backwards to articles about the plant types. Much of the terminology on the evolution article was beyond me. I had to follow many of the links on terms to other articles to understand the information. Interestingly, I disliked biology in school, so Science 10 would have been my last formal biology education. The article was an exciting read though. I turned the tables on my 12 year old son and started shouting out random facts to him as I read:
"Did you know there's a plant/colony of plants that are genetically identical over 40,000 years old?"
"Did you know there's evidence that some plants get better are reproducing and surviving the older they get? It's like the opposite of us humans!"
Resources:
https://www.livescience.com/33266-whats-the-difference-between-annual-and-perennial-flowers.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annual_vs._perennial_plant_evolution