This story of a delphinium like a tree is told by Lisa Foley:

I remembered how beautiful delphiniums had been when I was a very little girl, but by 1988 it had been over thirty years since I'd laid eyes on one. Around Christmas that year, I decided to plant some--from seed--and wait to see what happened. When the seedlings were hardy enough to plant out I had plenty to share and brought some, all alike, to my cousins' garden in Vermont.

They took well, my cousins told me, and I didn't give them another thought until the following year when my relatives raved about how beautiful the border looked with all those spires of blue in the back, except the one with no flowers, which was almost as tall as the eight-foot birdhouse post. That particular delphinium continued to grow through the season and bloomed the following year. The stem was as tall as the birdhouse and the flower spike reached a good two and a half feet beyond that. It continued to bloom that way for eight years. Of course, it fell over regularly of its own weight, but the stem never broke. The root ball pulled out of the ground like a tree in a storm. I'd never seen a delphinium like that before--and I haven't seen one since.

My cousins never did find anything to stake it effectively. It's immortalized in photographs, leaning over our shoulders or swooping menacingly over the children. It wasn't until it finally gave up the ghost that one cousin confided that her husband had always been a little afraid of it.