system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can we pinpoint the exact moment a plant dies?

With animals, it's easy to pinpoint the moment of death --- breathing, blood circulation, and brain activity stops.


However, how can we tell when a plant is dead? Is death a sudden cutoff in plant life as seen in animal life, or does it only occur along a gradual scale of healthiness? If you pick a carrot or potato, does it stay alive up until the moment of cooking? (unless it rots.) Do picked vegetables continue life independently after being removed from the mother plant, or is it removed living tissue such as cutting a finger off a human? Do potatoes enter something like cryptobiosis seen in sea monkeys? Are seeds dormant or alive? Potatoes can be stored for months, planted, and grow again... are they fully alive, dead, or dormant/hibernating? 

Can we identify the exact point that a plant is too wilted to make a recovery from lack of watering, or is it simply a decreasing % chance of recovery over time?

Is there a point that cut flowers become effectively dead? Obviously plant cuttings can remain alive for some period, as some can be rooted in water or soil to produce a clone.
gpt
Animals can be said to 'die' because they are built with a centralized body plan, and parts that are completely interdependent upon each other: one system for digestion, one for information processing, one for oxygen acquisition, etc etc. So the failure of any part quickly cascades into an overall shutdown, and the animal is dead.

Plants, on the other hand, do not have such limitations. Instead of completely interdependent organs, plants build themselves on a modular design. In any average tree, for instance, almost all of the tissues inside the trunk are 'dead' tissues: rigid, structure-providing cells with tough buildups of lignin and cellulose for structure, and porous, interconnected cells for water transport up from the ground, but in the trunk, you won't find many cells that are actually 'alive' and capable of reproduction or metabolism at all.

Plants don't 'die' the way animals do, any cell of a plant is capable of regenerating an entirely new plant if treated properly, and all the parts are interconnected, but not interdependent in the way that animal parts are.