Say goodbye (to some bamboo)

I grow a lot of bamboo, as regular readers know. Most of them are quite cold-hardy for St. Louis, but there are a few of them that are marginal. This means that they don't do well in our winters, and after a few years I've given up on them.

So this is the last look at three of them: two that are just not hardy enough, and one that is flowering heavily. That flowering one is Phyllostachys propinqua 'Beijing' and is shown above.

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Those brown "leaves" are not leaves. They are the flower structures:

Quite ugly and covering the whole plant and disappointing. Here it is from the other side:

There is one small section of this several feet away from the main plant that is not in flower -- I will dig that up and save it, but the rest is going to go. (Flowering bamboos typically die after putting all of their energy into the flowering. Although it may recover I do not intend on waiting another 3+ years to find out.)


Also going are these two on the other side of the yard:

Semiarundinaria fastuosa 'Viridis' on the left, and Phyllostachys nigra on the right.

The 'Viridis' never sizes up and looks sparse...

...and the nigra does, but every other year or so it topkills, resetting the plant to a juvenile state:

So I'm taking them out. I've already started.


And by "I'm taking them out" I mean that I've paid a neighborhood kid with a love of the gym to do the work.

More on the progress of this soon.


The hardest part of this will be moving the replacement bamboos into position.

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