Years ago, when I owned a different house than the one I'm living in now, I decided to plant a small stand of bamboo in my front yard. Alerted to the fact that some species of bamboo are "runners" and will send roots and new bamboo children all over the place, I carefully chose a type of bamboo which I was assured was a "clumper" or one that spread slowly.
My bamboo was neither a runner nor a clumper. It was a sprinter. In no time at all there was bamboo coming up all over the place, tens of feet away from the original stand. It was like the plague, spread by forces of evil in the middle of the night. It took forever to rip it all out. When I saw this video on the Wall Street Journal site, all of those memories came back.
2 comments:
There is a nice botanical garden in North County, I can't remember its name, that has just about every kind of bamboo imaginable. Their mini forests are impressive.
Dear KT Cat:
Your screed on bamboo made me shudder. It was ten years ago. My wife at the time and two teachers from the school where I worked in Argentina were doing some lengthy backpacking in the Argentine Andes. We came to an impasse we could not get around, a huge snow fall. We elected to attempt another route down a small canyon cut in two by a creek. It was a tremendous mistake, one that should have cost four lives. We became trapped for two days in bamboo. And this was after one of the tents collapsed and a tremendous week-long rainstorm fell upon us. To this day I remember that bamboo. We called it ‘damnboo.’ I hate it. I really hate it.
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