Bamboo box refresh

Remember that first bamboo planter box I created for a friend's garden? Well, the plant that I gave him for that box is just not a "good one".

So I helped him dig it out this past weekend and replace it with a better plant. I didn't take a lot of photos, but you may be interested anyway.

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Also I used my iPhone 4 camera, which has a terrible design flaw: the plastic camera lens cover protrudes a tiny bit from the back of the phone, so when the phone is placed on a table or any other surface the lens cover contacts the surface and ends up getting scratched.

The result is a very foggy look to all photos. I need to remove this little lens cover or replace it.

In any case, you can see that this bamboo has produced a thicket of tiny culms:

It hasn't really sized up in the 3 years since I planted it. My theory is that this was a field division taken from an old grove, and I didn't get any of the most vigorous parts of the rhizome when I dug it. Instead of a single larger rhizome, I got several smaller rhizomes in this division, so there are many plants competing here.

Although my friend was fine with waiting another year or two to see what happened, I forced him to give up on the plant.

Lots of chopping, digging, prying, and ripping out of rhizomes and roots followed, but I gave him a nice single-rhizome plant to replace the disappointing one:

The original plant was Phyllostachy aureosulcata, or "Yellow Groove" bamboo. The replacement is a form (or "cultivar") of this same species called 'Harbin Inversa'. Instead of green culms with a yellow sulcus (groove) like the removed plant, this one is yellow with thin green stripes.

This should be much more rewarding for him, especially if we have another mild winter.

I'll post an update in the summer.


In the meantime, I have a truck bed full of small Yellow Groove divisions that I'm going to compost, unless somebody wants a bunch of small plants?

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