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How to Grow Bamboo

Bamboo is a mysterious and elusive plant that baffles taxonomists who try to contain it within a botanical class and gardeners who try to contain it within a limited garden space as they learn how to grow bamboo. For many years, bamboo was thought to be a primitive grass but recent DNA testing has shown it to be one of most highly evolved forest grasses. There are over 1200 forms of bamboo that grow in a broad spectrum of color including familiar green and gold as well as burgundy, blue and even black grasses. Some varieties of bamboo can grow up to a foot a day and ultimately reach 130 feet tall while smallest bamboo cultivar attains only six inches of growth.

The first step in learning how to grow bamboo is picking a cultivar and beginning to unravel its many mysteries. While most of us picture tall stands of green and golden canes growing in tropical bamboo forests, bamboo cultivars range from temperate to tropical. As well as diversity in cultivar, bamboo has over 1500 documented uses that range from use in construction to making of acupuncture needles and from agricultural fodder to making of musical instruments. Until they are cut, bamboos stems are properly called culms and not canes. In India bamboo plants are commonly called "Wood of poor" and in China the” friend of people". To add to confusion, a cultivar commonly sold as “lucky bamboo” isn’t bamboo at all but a type of lily from Dracaena family!