One of the more dramatic life histories in the natural world is that characterized by a single, massive, fatal reproductive episode ('semelparity'). A wealth of increasingly sophisticated theoretical models on differential life history evolution have been produced over the last two decades. In recent years, empirical studies of the ecology of semelparous plants (and their iteroparous relatives) have begun to address many aspects of the biology of these species, and to test the assumptions and predictions of theoretical models. Semelparity in long-lived plants is one of the few natural phenomena that has yielded specific quantitative tests of mathematical evolutionary theory.