I have an aloe plant (soap aloe, I think) that blooms a few times a year. When it blooms, brother, it blooms. In a frankly egregious display, a thick stem with a bulbous head ejects from the center of the plant at a rate of several inches a day until it’s a few feet tall. Then it flowers for a week or two, and then the whole stem dries up and dies.
So what’s going on there? Is it actually growing at that rate? Is the stem prepared inside the plant and pushed out through some kind of mechanical process? If so, what is that process?
Likewise for any other plant (or heck, fungus) that grows extremely quickly under certain conditions. How do? How even do?
Yes. The apial meristem.
The meristems create the new cells via mitosis.
Then the cells expand as they are filled with water (and other stuff but mainly water).
Have a close look at the way fern fronds grow for a readily available example.
Considering how fast they grow they still have an amazing amount of substance to them. We hollow them out and use them for arrow quivers. One some large varieties I have seen them at least 10 ft high.
I hiked across the Grand Canyon several years ago. As you’d expect, it’s hot and dry, and everything is very dusty; except I saw a few plants with tall, vivid green stems sticking up about ten feet. I asked a ranger what they were, and she said they were an agave (Utah agave, I think). It’s not that they were rare, it’s just that I was only noticing the ones that were flowering. The ones that weren’t in flower were as dusty and dull as everything else.
I don’t know how long it takes them to grow those stems, or if agaves are close relatives to your aloe plant.
A related question occurs to me. If plants can grow that quickly, why don’t more of them do it? Seems like it would be a competitive advantage for a plant to grow quickly; reach up to that sweet, sweet sunlight before the neighbors do. Why do only a few plants grow that quickly, only a portion of them, and only at that one stage in their life cycle?
(Maybe it’s not completely unknown. I’ve heard bamboo grows quickly.)
Anything on a plant has a cost and extreme things like growing quickly to great heights have extreme costs. For most plants, evolution found a different, probably less costly, way to do the same thing these fast growing plants do.