A rare flower is in a superbloom in the Rocky Mountains
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INOUYE: Well, some previous work that had been done here on these gentians, they found lots and lots of plants in one year, and then they came back to study them the next year, and there were almost no flowering plants. And Chip Taylor from the University of Kansas and I decided that we would try and discover what it was that created this kind of off-year and then on-year flowering pattern. And we started tagging several hundred plants in 1973 that we could come back and find again. And I've kept that study going now since 1973. So some of the plants that we're following, we've been looking at for over 50 years, and some of those plants have still not yet flowered up at the...

RASCOE: Oh, wow.

INOUYE: ...Higher altitudes.

RASCOE: Wow. They still haven't flowered over 50 years?

INOUYE: That's right. And in, see, 1982, I planted some seeds, and the first one to flower was 20 years later in 2003. And then after 40 years, I think all of them have finally flowered and died.

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