“Bamboo grows really fast, doesn’t it?”
“But isn’t bamboo terribly invasive?”
“I want to plant bamboo as a visual screen. How many plants do I need?”
“When is the best time of year to plant bamboo?”
“Why are bamboos more expensive than many other plants I see for sale?”
“What’s the best variety of bamboo to use as a construction material?”
“What’s the best variety for edible bamboo shoot production?”
“My yard has a lot of shade. Can I still grow clumping bamboo?”
“Can I divide the plants I get from Florida Bamboo to get more plants?”
“Since running bamboos spread so quickly, wouldn’t planting some of them be a cheaper way to grow a visual screen along my property line rather than planting a clumping bamboo every few feet?”
“Can’t I just plant running bamboo and keep it contained with a barrier underground?”
“How do plants from Florida Bamboo compare to those from other nurseries?”
“Bamboo grows really fast, doesn’t it?”
Yes and no…and yes. How’s that for a straightforward answer? Bamboo’s unusual growth habit makes this a more complex question than it might seem.
When people say, “bamboo grows fast,” they could be referring to:
-the speed at which a small, newly planted bamboo grows into a large, mature plant in the landscape.
-the speed at which individual new canes emerge and grow to their full height within a mature clump of bamboo.
-the rate of horizontal spread of a running variety of bamboo.
The most relevant of these to someone considering planting bamboo is: how quickly will this little plant turn into a big, mature clump of bamboo in my landscape? And the answer to that is: clumping bamboo will grow faster than just about anything else you could plant. Get some three-gallon sized pots or field-dug clumps of green multiplex, set them in the ground along a property line and keep them watered, and within two to three years they’ll turn into a twenty foot tall wall of green for quick privacy. Plant a Royal or Buddha’s Belly and give it good care, and in four to five years it will assume the size and stature of a mature oak tree in the landscape.
But what about the stories about bamboo growing at a rate of a foot a day or more? That’s true, too, in a way. A patch of bamboo grows new canes once a year. All year long the plant uses sunlight to make food energy its foliage, and it sends that food energy down, storing it in the underground rhizome system. Once a year, the plant uses all that stored energy to grow a new crop of canes. Because those new canes are powered by a year’s worth of stored energy, they grow at breakneck pace, reaching their full height in six to eight weeks. On a mature patch of a large-growing type of bamboo, the speed of those new canes can indeed be a foot a day during their weeks-long growth spurt.
People sometimes get confused about this. They hear that “bamboo grows a foot a day”, and they figure that means they can stick a small plant in the ground of a variety whose ultimate height is 50 feet, and then 50 days later their little plant will have grown into a 50 foot giant. The reason it doesn’t work that way is that a little plant doesn’t have the resources of a mature patch. The little plant doesn’t have all those thousands of leaves, making food energy in the sun, and it doesn’t have a big network of underground rhizomes to store that food energy in. So it has to build those up, step by step.
When you put a small bamboo plant in the ground, the plant increases its height by sending up, once a year, a crop of new shoots that grow rapidly to about ten to fifteen feet taller than the previous year’s canes – that’s where the overall yearly increase the height of the entire clump comes from. That means that under good care, you can expect your patch of bamboo to increase in height about ten to fifteen feet a year, maybe a bit faster if you really pamper it. So for a variety with an ultimate height of about 50 feet, a small plant takes about four or five years to reach that height. Which is faster than just about any other landscape plant. (How many trees can grow to 50 feet tall in just four or five years?)
Once the clump has reached its full size and height, at four to five years old, then you can see really fast growth of individual canes during the late summer shooting season, in which shoots break through the ground and race upwards at rates of a foot a day or more to become fifty foot tall canes in just two months.
So, getting back to the question… yes, clumping bamboos do grow at a rate far exceeding that of most landscape plants, but no, a small, newly planted bamboo will not grow fifty feet tall in fifty days. And yes, once your bamboo plants have been in the ground for several years you should be able to watch new shoots grow at the extraordinary rate of a foot or so per day.
“But isn’t bamboo terribly invasive?”
Some kinds are. There are over a thousand species of bamboo, though, and many are not invasive. Their natural growth habit is to grow in very tight, compact clumps which expand outward by only a few inches a year. Those are the types we specialize in at Florida Bamboo. They are very different from the more commonly seen invasive, running types of bamboo. See Runners vs. Clumpers for a discussion of the differences.
“I want to plant bamboo as a visual screen. How many plants do I need?”
Usually a five foot spacing works well for creating a visual screen. By the time the plants are getting some size and density two years after planting, they’ll be filling the gaps between plants. By three years, the “wall of green” will be pretty solid (assuming you’re keeping them watered). At planting time, it’s always hard to believe that those piddling little wisps of green that you’re setting on a five foot spacing could ever solidly close the gaps in between, but they do.
It’s possible to hurry things along a bit by spacing plants closer, but you start to reach a point of diminishing returns at spacings closer than about three feet: your costs start to go up rapidly (because you need more plants) while only marginally increasing the speed at which you get visual screening.
On the other hand, if your plant-purchasing budget is smaller, it’s possible to space the plants more widely, but it will take a bit longer for them to solidly close the gaps between. On an eight foot spacing, it may take five years before the plants solidly close the gaps -but you’ll still get good intermittent visual screening by the second to third year.
If you’ve got a really small budget, a long time horizon, or a really long fence line to cover, you can plant out just a few plants, take good care of them, and after a few years divide them yourself to plant along the rest of the fence line.
“When is the best time of year to plant bamboo?”
Field-dug bamboos are available only during winter and early spring, and they should be planted right away once you get them. Ideally that means planting them in the ground, but if you don’t have a location ready, then put field dug bamboos in containers full of soil until you are ready to set them in the ground.
Containerized bamboos can successfully be planted out at any time of the year. But because they make so much growth so quickly during the warm season, for fastest results it is important not to delay once the warm season has begun in March. Every month’s delay in planting after early spring means less growing time available to the plants. By year’s end, bamboos set in the ground in March will be larger than ones planted in June, which will be larger than ones planted in August. So if it is spring or summer as you are contemplating planting bamboo – don’t delay!
During the cool season (roughly November to February), plants make much less growth, and a delay in planting during that period is much less critical. Plants set in the ground in February wouldn’t lag a whole lot behind those planted in November.
If you are planting a variety at the northern edge of its cold hardiness, it may actually be to your advantage to wait until winter’s end. Bigger plants resist cold better, and by planting in spring your plants will have a year’s worth of growth on them by the time winter comes around again.
“Why are clumping bamboos more expensive than many other plants I see for sale?”
Propagating clumping bamboo is an EXTREMELY labor-intensive process. Because these plants rarely produce seed, and most don’t start well from cuttings, new plants must be started by dividing the rhizome system of existing ones. The very growth habit that makes clumping bamboos so desirable as landscape plants – tightly grouped clumps of canes that don’t spread aggressively – makes them very difficult to divide. Underneath those canes is a gnarled mass of thick, woody rhizomes that resist cutting with all their woody might. And the larger a bamboo variety is, the more difficult it is to divide those rhizomes – digging pieces of eight foot tall Chinese Goddess is child’s play compared to digging 55 foot tall Buddha’s Belly, whose rhizome system sometimes extends as much as three feet underground.
Additionally, many varieties are quite rare and highly in demand. Generally, Florida Bamboo’s prices are either in the same range or lower than those charged by other nurseries in Florida for equivalent plants, sometimes considerably lower. Since bamboos provide such an elegant, majestic quality to the landscape, and reach full size and impressiveness years faster than many plants that are much more expensive, many people find the prices quite reasonable.
“What’s the best variety of bamboo to use as a construction material?”
If you live in central or southern Florida, Giant Timber bamboo (Bambusa oldhamii) is quite a good choice for a bamboo to produce canes for construction material. In North Florida, after a series of mild winters it can produce suitable canes for construction, but in this region colder winters can knock it back, killing existing canes and reducing the size of the next year’s crop of canes.
Royal Bamboo has wonderfully straight canes, but they are thin-walled and suitable only where they don’t need to support heavy weight. Buddha’s Belly canes are much thicker-walled and stronger, but they tend to have a bit of a zig-zag – this one might be a good choice for projects where perfect straightness is not critical. Puntingpole bamboo has fairly straight, thick-walled canes.
Green Multiplex, Silverstripe and Alphonse Karr are straight and thick-walled and more cold-hardy, but they usually don’t get more than 1-1.5 inches in diameter, so they would be suitable only for projects where smaller-diameter material is needed (smaller-diameter canes can be bundled together to make strong load-bearing pieces).
Be sure to research proper cutting and curing and treating techniques to minimize the danger of fungus and insects destroying your canes.
“What’s the best variety for edible bamboo shoot production?”
I don’t have much experience with harvesting and preparing bamboo shoots, so this answer is largely based on reports from others, but Royal Bamboo and Giant Timber are reported in the literature as having high quality shoots.
“My yard has a lot of shade. Can I still grow clumping bamboo?”
The larger varieties of clumping bamboo prefer full sun, but can grow quite well if they get at least a few hours of sun a day, especially if it is mid-day summer sun (that is, if there is at least a patch of sky open directly above the plant). And because the big types do grow so tall, once they reach full size the top of the plant frequently reaches into full or nearly full sun even if the original plant was planted in the shade.
The small to medium types will stay shorter and denser in full sun, and will stretch out a bit in partial shade, with less foliage on the lower part of the plant. This can actually be quite attractive, especially with varieties like Alphonse Karr that have particularly attractive canes. If there are at least a few patches of sun that move through the area over the course of the day, the small to medium types can give pretty good growth (and make a good visual screen).
“Can I divide the plants I get from Florida Bamboo to get more plants?”
Dividing bamboo is a tricky process that can be very labor-intensive to do successfully – this is why clumping bamboo prices are higher than for many other plants. For a containerized bamboo with several canes, it is sometimes possible to divide the plant into one or more plants, but if the cuts are not made in exactly the right spot on the rhizome, one or more of the plants might not be viable. You might kill your new plant in the process of trying to divide it. And even when the cuts are made successfully and viable daughter plants result, it is important to keep in mind that you are setting them back by dividing them – postponing by a year or more the time when they send up full-sized, mature canes.
What I recommend you do to propagate your own bamboos is to plant them out in the ground, let them grow two or more years, then dig out groups of two to four canes (with their attached rhizomes) to plant elsewhere. This works best with the Bambusa multiplex varieties, especially the small ones like Chinese Goddess. For the giant clumping types the thick, woody rhizomes make this process somewhat challenging.
“Since running bamboos spread so quickly, wouldn’t planting some of them be a cheaper way to grow a visual screen along my property line rather than planting a clumping bamboo every few feet?”
There are two problems with this strategy. The first is that the running bamboo will try to spread in all directions at once. It won’t just grow linearly along the property edge, but will also spread aggressively away from it into your yard, and will invade your neighbor’s yard (people have been sued over this). Many running types can send up shoots as much as 30 feet from the nearest existing cane, so both sides of the fence line would need to be getting mowed regularly for at least 30 feet from the edge of the bamboo planting to take out the new shoots as they appear.
The second problem is that because running bamboos in their first years spend much of their energy investing in that underground network of running rhizomes, they take longer than clumpers to produce an equivalent amount of above ground growth, so it would take more years till you get privacy than with clumping types. Also, since running bamboos usually don’t grow as thickly as clumping bamboos, you would need to allow for a thicker hedge to get good visual screening.
“Can’t I just plant running bamboo and keep it contained with a barrier underground?”
In theory this is possible, but the complications of the real world make it very difficult to achieve in practice. Some people claim they’ve successfully contained running bamboos with underground barriers, but most materials eventually crack, and running bamboo rhizomes are very good at finding even tiny cracks and penetrating through them. Burying a rhizome barrier around an entire patch of bamboo involves a lot of work and expense. All it takes is for a single running bamboo rhizome to escape through a seam or crack, and then the horse is out of the barn – at that point all your work to install the barrier is rendered instantly useless. At the botanical gardens in Gainesville, two-foot deep underground brick walls installed to contain the running bamboos haven’t worked: the bamboos have escaped.
The only containment strategy I’ve seen that really seems to work to confine a patch of running bamboo is to plant the bamboo in an area that is already getting either mowed or grazed for a distance of at least thirty feet in all directions. If you don’t have this situation, you are better off sticking with clumping bamboo.
“How do plants from Florida Bamboo compare to those from other nurseries?”
One thing to be aware of in shopping for bamboo, especially containerized plants, is that since small potted bamboos frequently don’t show the characteristics that will distinguish different varieties as mature plants, it is critical for a nursery to keep separate their different species. While there are many conscientious nursery managers who take great pains to keep their plants from getting mixed up, there are some who tend towards a less careful management style.
You do not want to spend a lot of money on a bamboo plant and years of your life caring for it, only to discover that it is the wrong variety and will not do what you wanted it to – all because of sloppiness at the nursery.
At Florida Bamboo, I take extreme care to make sure the plants I sell are what I say they are – sometimes even to the point of not selling a questionable variety until I have planted one in the ground and grown it to the point that I am satisfied that it is what it is supposed to be.
For additional information on planting and growing bamboo, see the pages:
About Bamboo
Bamboo Planting & Care
Bamboo Questions & Answers
Bamboo Cold Hardiness
Florida Bamboo & Fruit Trees 