Guest post by Sally Blanton
I confess that I did voluntarily plant a start of bamboo in my residential, urban yard because how else could you get a beautiful living privacy fence 25’ tall or higher? I got my start at the local arboretum, believe it or not. And when the wind blew, it was really pretty.
Sure the snow and ice bent it over the fence onto the school driveway that abuts my yard, causing me to go out and use heavy loppers to cut it. Lots of people said they liked it and some parents even told me that the children loved the way the wet branches swept their cars as they drove by.
And at first I had a nice crop of bamboo stalks I could post on buy nothing sites to share with anyone who could use them. It was definitely a renewable crop.
Then the stalks got big. Really big and bamboo started popping up in my flower beds — flower beds that were at least 20 feet away. The love affair was over. It was time to remove it, without destroying other plants, if possible.
Of course, I knew it could be invasive, but I had no idea of the survival skills of this plant. I consulted the internet, botanists I knew, people who claimed to have confronted the Devil Bamboo and won. Some claimed that toxic herbicides would do it in, others that it could be smothered, or burned or just discouraged by mowing. How wrong they all were.
Bamboo does not grow in a linear fashion, it continually branches out like a vast underground spider web, and when attacked, it just goes deeper. I had always prided myself on my scorn for chemical agriculture, but I lost my organic virginity in this fight.
And I sold my soul for nothing because herbicides only kill the growth visible above ground. Under the ground, the
runners keep on keeping on, putting up nice new green buds with impunity.
So I hired laborers with mattocks and stump grinders and plenty of energy. We amassed a stack of bamboo skeletons (my trophies) that were 6’ tall and 8’ long. My formerly beautiful yard looked like a war zone.
That was last fall. Our unusually cold winter here in central Kentucky gave me hope that this rejected botanical lover would skulk away, never more to be seen, or at least be so humiliated he wouldn’t appear freshly clothed in new green.
Wrong. So instead of the peaceful, laid back slow-paced gardening that a woman of my age should be enjoying, I once again take up the mattocks, shovels and pitchforks to continue the attack.
Will it kill me before I kill it? Quite likely.
Sally Blanton gardens in Lexington, Kentucky.
Bamboo image by Alain Van den Hende, courtesy of wiki commons. (It’s not Sally’s bamboo.)
I came so close to planting it, many times. The city I live in recently made an ordinance that it cannot legally planted within city limits. I am glad.
Like you, I too planted bamboo in the hopes of getting a privacy screen. The idea was that the bamboo would provide the screen and perhaps spread into the vacant lot next door. I got the screen alright but the spreading was back into my garden, not the vacant lot, which I should have anticipated since the vacant lot is north of my property. However, rather than try to eradicate the bamboo–a near impossible task–I just control it. I’ve found that if one just kicks over the new, unwanted shoots in the spring while they are green and brittle, that’s it for the season. Of course the process has to be repeated every spring, but it’s worked for 40 years. And I still have my screen and a source of bamboo poles of all sizes whenever I want them.
We had the same experience. It did make a nice block of the neighbor’s place. When it started to be a problem. We ended up lopping it off, herbiciding new sports and keeping it mowed. We seem to have conquered it, three years later. BUT, we still have mini bamboo to conquer and it is harder to beat.. I just keep herbiciding every shoot I see but they are harder to spot than the larger leaves of the bigger bamboo. And I swear, the mini type has roots that are harder to try digging out.
I bought a home with bamboo in the back. I wrongly assumed that it was coming from the neighbors’ yards. I discovered that the best way to kill it is yes, chemical warfare. But not just spray and run. No, you have to cut the stalk low, then paint each immediately with undiluted glyphosate. Do the same for any new sprouts that dare to surface. If the stalk is large enough to be hollow in the center, paint the inside wall too. And if you want to venture again into bamboo, know that there are clumping varieties that do not seek world domination – they stay in their location and grow wider from that point. They can be divided like daylilies or irises, and relocated if they start to crowd. But you won’t find their runners coming up on the opposite side of the yard.
I planted bamboo in my garden in San Francisco as a privacy screen over the objections of my gardener who wanted to plant something I considered ugly. I did my homework first because ignoring the advice of your gardener is often unwise.
I learned that certain species of bamboo that are called “clumpers” don’t spread by runners like other species do. It worked perfectly, I had my screen to hide the butt-ugly back neighbor’s house and their equally ugly yard. In 25-years it did not spread into other areas in the garden in the sandy soil of the western side of San Francisco. It complemented the Japanese maples in the garden and most importantly, it survived in an unforgiving climate and soil conditions.
The lesson: do your homework and consider the microclimate you live in before rejecting bamboo.
The local display garden planted bamboo, with barriers. Five years later, a man with a backhoe was persuaded to remove it. The root balls, soil and all were taken to the compost center.
I planted a clumping bamboo, which was manageable. And then it bloomed, along with all of the starts around the state, and died back. No more bamboo for this gardener! And it gets mites!
Early in our marriage, probably about 1973, my husband and I planted a little pot of bamboo out near the far corner of the back yard. We knew it would try to spread, but we thought we could prevent that by mowing around it. That worked fine for a while, as far as we could see. Then I decided to plant a flower bed–but it was on the other side of the yard, and all the area between bamboo and flowers was regularly mowed. All was well.
Years passed, and eventually I planted more and more flowers, until eventually the flower garden took over the back half of the yard, with bamboo growing right up against its edge. And right into the midst of the flowers. Also, by this time, it was spreading into the neighbors’ yards. The neighbors didn’t seem to mind, but I did and have been fighting bamboo ever since (with paid help now that I am almost 80 with bad knees, hips, back, etc.)
If you cut it down, it comes back up—not where it was when you cut it, but farther into your flowers. And deeper. It has a knack for coming up right in the middle of a big clump of something you really like. If you plant an underground barrier to contain it, it just dives down deeper. It dies back in the winter, but then it comes back stronger—and taller—in the spring. I grew desperate enough to consider herbicides, but read that they don’t work, so figured there was no point in poisoning the rest of my plants and damaging the ecosystem only to be left with nothing but bamboo.
Alas.
It’s my own fault. It was my husband’s idea, but I supported it enthusiastically. It has outlived him and will presumably outlive me. Take heed from my sad story and DON’T PLANT BAMBOO, at least not the “running” kind. (There are clumping varieties that supposedly don’t behave this way.)
(I see that while I was writing this other people have chimed in with helpful advice that worked for them. I’m not about to start applying glyphosate at this point. My advice remains: don’t plant it.)
There is a way to get rid of bamboo.
Move.
(Sorry for the bad joke. Bamboo was planted on the property of my childhood home. We learned the hard way, I have since learned that not all bamboo is bad, but I’m not testing it!)
well put. Some plants are like some breeds of dog, not suitable for you. Research or suffer. Your choice. The internet is free.
I was invaded by a running bamboo (not a clumping variety) from my neighbor’s yard. It was between my fence and my greenhouse to I let it grow for a while. The neighbors tore it out of their yard, but it kept growing in mine and began spreading. Since the runners depend upon photosynthetic support from leaves in order to grow and spread, I started to clip any new growth that appeared. After about three years of this the bamboo gave up and the roots died.
so, here’s the deal with bamboo. bamboo sends out its runners in the fall and they are usually within four-six inches of the surface. If you go out in the yard after your Thanksgiving dinner you can tease them out of the soil and keep everything close to the mother plant. If you let them go a few years then you are screwed! I have a few clumping varieties of bamboo that are fairly well behaved but they are really what i like to call crawlers rather than clumpers. Plus, at least for us in the northwest, most of the clumpers won’t get as tall as the timber or running types so they don’t work as well for screens. Persistence is what is required to control it.
I wish I had had photos to accompany my rant because I could have shown the readers runners which apppeared dead, that is, they had been out of the ground for months–yet were sprouting new growth.
Also runners with nice browned sprouts (from chemical spray) and 4-5″ further, fresh green growth. My favorite one had been cut laterally in a prior attempt to control it, appeared dead & it looked really dessicated–until you noticed the fresh, green sprout. I appreciate all the comments but I do think it makes a difference in how long it has been allowed to flourish–in my case over 10 years. The runners in that case are not small in diameter, they are quite large and they have many, many side shoots which in turn have their own side shoots……and as one reader observed they go deeper when under attack.