Madake, a Japanese timber bamboo, flowers about once every 120 years, and then the flowering stalks die. In the late 1960s it flowered in Japan, and at roughly the same time so did stands that had been carried off to England, Alabama and Russia decades before, half a world from their parents and from each other. Nothing passed between them. No signal crossed the ocean; the plants did not agree on a date. They were simply the same plant, cuttings of one stock, and each piece had carried the whole calendar inside it when it was cut and shipped. I find that the strangest kind of keeping an appointment: not remembering to turn up, but being the appointment.