Perennial
A perennial is a plant which dies back to its roots each winter (or dry season), but returns each year without replanting.<ref>Wile, Dr. Jay L. Exploring Creation With Biology. Apologia Educational Ministries, Inc. 1998</ref>
Under favorable conditions, as the years pass the plant will generate more and more stems, growing slowly larger in the process. This is a boon to the ornamental gardener, since planting once results in more decoration every year. Sometimes, however, a plant that is doing this will need to be divided in order to maintain its health and productivity.
Some woody plants act like perennials in colder climates. A good example of this is the butterfly bush, which can become a very large shrub in warmer climes, but when it encounters colder winters it dies back and has to start over again every year.
A special subset of perennials are plants that form bulbs or tubers, where all the energy for the next year's growth is stored in a large underground organ (the bulb), which is exhausted and then replenished or reformed over the course of each growing cycle. The most familiar examples of these are tulips and daffodils (bulbs), and potatoes (tubers).
A perennial should not be confused with a self-reseeding annual or biennial, since those plants die after one or two years respectively but do not need to be replanted because they regrow from seeds in the garden.
- Snippet from Wikipedia: Perennial
In botany, a perennial plant or simply perennial is a plant that lives more than two years. The term (per- + -ennial, "through the years") is often used to differentiate a plant from shorter-lived annuals and biennials. The term is also widely used to distinguish plants with little or no woody growth (secondary growth in girth) from trees and shrubs, which are also technically perennials. Notably, it is estimated that 94% of plant species fall under the category of perennials, underscoring the prevalence of plants with lifespans exceeding two years in the botanical world.
Perennials—especially small flowering plants—that grow and bloom over the spring and summer, die back every autumn and winter, and then return in the spring from their rootstock or other overwintering structure, are known as herbaceous perennials. However, depending on the rigours of the local climate (temperature, moisture, organic content in the soil, microorganisms), a plant that is a perennial in its native habitat, or in a milder garden, may be treated by a gardener as an annual and planted out every year, from seed, from cuttings, or from divisions. Tomato vines, for example, live several years in their natural tropical/subtropical habitat but are grown as annuals in temperate regions because their above-ground biomass does not survive the winter.
There is also a class of evergreen perennials which lack woody stems, such as Bergenia which retain a mantle of leaves throughout the year. An intermediate class of plants is known as subshrubs, which retain a vestigial woody structure in winter, e.g. Penstemon.
The symbol for a perennial plant, based on Species Plantarum by Linnaeus, is , which is also the astronomical symbol for the planet Jupiter.