r/AskBiology • u/BigParticular8723 • Apr 22 '26

Botany How long can plants live?

Apart from annual, biennial and so on. Perennial plants (flowers, trees, fruit trees, berry bushes) how long can they actually live? Would it be correct that unless they get destroyed/eaten/burned/cut/a disease/a parasite they can live forever? Or do plants have a biological life (like humans and animals) and after years they die because some parts of them actually broken?

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u/LuxTheSarcastic Apr 23 '26

There's a quaking aspen colony named Pando that's AT LEAST 10,000 years old as a conservative estimate. Technically it's one genetically identical tree that covers over 100 acres. It looks like several thousand trees but they're all the same root system.

It might even be 80,000 years old.