This is the answer to something I wondered about last week in Winner of the Biggest Bloom Contest. This is what the tall spikes look like when they bloom. What still isn’t answered is whether the full bloom will kill the plant and, of course, why anything so grand was necessary in the first place. This isn’t a question that Nature tends to ask. I suppose under the right conditions there could be entire valleys or stretches of coast line filled with such plants. In which case we might not wonder why such grandeur was necessary. The answer would be obvious. In another month the entire spike should be in bloom, and sometime after that we will have the answer to the second question. Will the bloom kill the plant? Some plants are like salmon swimming upstream. They procreate and then they die, but in the process they produce enormous quantities of offspring. While others procreate grandly and go right on living. Which will it be?