page_title: Perennial plant
section_title: Life cycle and structure
hierarchical_section_title: Perennial plant / Life cycle and structure
caption_attribution_description: English: Dahlia
context_page_description: A perennial plant or simply perennial is a plant that lives more than two years. The term 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 from trees and shrubs, which are also technically perennials.
  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, are known as herbaceous perennials. However, depending on the rigors of local climate, 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 they don't survive the winter.
  There is also a class of evergreen, or non-herbaceous, perennials, including plants like Bergenia which retain a mantle of leaves throughout the year.
context_section_description: Perennial plants can be short-lived (only a few years) or like peonies they can be as long-lived as some woody plants like trees. They include a wide assortment of plant groups from ferns and liverworts to the highly diverse flowering plants like orchids and grasses.
  Plants that flower and fruit only once and then die are termed monocarpic or semelparous. However, most perennials are polycarpic (or iteroparous), flowering over many seasons in their lifetime.
  Perennials typically grow structures that allow them to adapt to living from one year to the next through a form of vegetative reproduction rather than seeding. These structures include bulbs, tubers, woody crowns, and rhizomes. They might have specialized stems or crowns that allow them to survive periods of dormancy over cold or dry seasons during the year. Annuals, by contrast,  produce seeds to continue the species as a new generation while the growing season is suitable, and the seeds survive over the cold or dry period, to begin growth when the conditions are again suitable.
  Many perennials have developed specialized features that allow them to survive extreme climatic and environmental conditions. Some have adapted to survive hot and dry conditions or cold temperatures. Those plants tend to invest many resources into their adaptations and often do not flower and set seed until after a few years of growth. Many perennials produce relatively large seeds, which can have an advantage, with larger seedlings produced after germination that can better compete with other plants. Some annuals produce many more seeds per plant in one season, while some (polycarpic) perennials are not under the same pressure to produce large numbers of seeds but can produce seeds over many years.
  Dividing perennial plants is something that gardeners do around the months of September and October or in early spring. The point of doing the divisionin early autumn is to allow approximately six weeks for adequate root growth prior to the ground reaching a freezing temperature. Due to the leaves falling from trees, as well as the copious rain received in most places during the fall weeks, the ground has adequate moisture for rapid growth. Perennials that are insecurely or marginally hardy are best divided in spring.
  Each type of plant must be separated differently;for example, plants with fibrous root systems like daylilies, Siberian iris or grasses can be pried apart with two garden forks inserted back to back, or cut by knives.  However, plants such as bearded irises have a root system of rhizomes; these root systems should be planted with the top of the rhizome just above ground level, with leaves from the following year showing.  The point of dividing perennials is to increase the amount of a single breed of plant in your garden. The more you divide your perennial plants every year, the more vast your garden will grow.
caption: Dahlia plants are perennial in very soft climates.
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