Species: Puya raimondii
Puya was a good name for a rock band, and they made it together from about 1988 to 2001. It is still a good name for a genus of truly bizarre plants.
The species shown here, Puya raimondii, grows at high altitude in the Peruvian andes, from 3000 to 5000 m above sea level, especially in the Valley of Pachacoto. Related to pineapple and Spanish moss, it grows in a big, spikey rosette for a hundred years or more before sending up a very tall flowering shoot - inflorescence - containing millions of small flowers. Despite the altitude, and the cold and dry environment, the flowers are hummingbird pollinated.
Perhaps the most curious thing about Puya is that once it has flowered and the seeds have been formed, the whole plant dies. That is truly odd, because we usually think of perennials as flowering many times and producing many lots of seeds.
But Puya is not the only plant that does this. Many bamboos, including the ones that serve as the major food source for giant pandas, are the same. When their food source flowers and dies, the pandas have to move to new areas. That alone is responsible for much of the decline of the pandas as landscape alteration and fragmentation by humans has limited the availability of hillsides, and of bamboos.
In 1977, Robin Foster dubbed another semelparous perennial "suicidal". The tree, Tachigalia versicolor flowers synchronously, that is, many of them bloom at once, then die. Indeed, he identified several other members of the same genus that do the same thing.
Sometimes, this behavior can be inconvenient, at least for people. In the botanical gardens at Peredinaya, Sri Lanka, for example, the approach road was lined with tall tailipot palms Corypha spp.. This was all stately enough until the year that each of the trees sent up a flowering shoot nearly as tall as the tree itself. Of course, soon after this magnificant display, all the trees died.
Further reading -
Foster, RB, 1977, Tachigalia versicolor is a suicidal neotropical tree. Nature 268: 624-626.
Young, TP and CK Augspurger, 1991, Ecology and evolution of long-lived semelparous plants Trends in Ecology and Evolution 6:285-289.