Bambusoideled

We remain digital ingenus, and we learned only this week, and by accident, that Alexa has a “question of the day” for the general amusement of her large clientele.  We then had to check the day’s question out, of course.  It turned out to be a soft pitch, and we were able to knock it out of the park.  “What,” Alexa wanted to know, “is the fastest growing plant?”  The answer is bamboo (Bambuseae), as we have good reason to know.

We moved into our house, the only one we have ever actually owned, just over thirty years ago.  It is a largish modern rectangular house with a flat roof (bad idea) and a glass wall on the back looking out into natural beauty (good idea) and a path through woods down to the lake a quarter of a mile away.  I can rightfully call it “architect designed,” since a Professor in the Architecture School designed it.  I think we are the third owners of the house, and will almost certainly be the last.  The edifice and its occupants seem on track for simultaneous collapse.  The man who built the house must have had been a spiritual Californian.  At any event, he put in a few bamboo plants among some massive and carefully strewn boulders on the west side of the property.

These plants had become a dense grove by the time we moved in, and within two more years they had surrounded the aforementioned boulders, creating within our larger garden a kind of mystery zone perfectly suited to entrance small grandchildren.   The mature bamboo is a beautiful thing to behold both in the pattern of the leafing and in the fascinating segmentation of the small circular trunk, which have presented an inexhaustible subject for classical Chinese and Japanese painters.  The leafy tops of these giant grasses (as they are technically classified) dance and bend with the breeze, creating a strange sensation of violent motion tethered to a graceful solidity.  In heavy or icy snow their tops may bend all the way to the ground; and since many are thirty feet tall, that means roughly a third of the way across the whole back lawn.  Quite soon we had to lay down an imaginary red line beyond which we were prepared to fight back.

The appearance of the roots is skeletal, like yellowish-green human finger bones, but of seemingly infinite length.  They shoot out underground in a straight line, every now and again barely breaking the surface to expose an inch or two of serpentine loop.  It is along these shallowly subterranean and rapidly advancing roots, stronger than Antaeus in their earth-grip and virtually ineradicable, that the new vertical bamboo shoots spring up.

Giving the bamboo its inch, which allows you to enjoy the beauty, is very difficult.  For it wants its mile, or rather unlimited mileage, which can ruin your garden in very short order.  So far as I can tell there are only two solutions.  The first is to construct subterranean containment walls deep enough to block the advance of the roots.  My son in Brooklyn, a great bamboo aficionado,  lucked into this solution.  The old house he bought in Red Hook had most inappropriately in its small back yard a small cement swimming pool that looked as though it dated from the ‘Fifties (maybe the 1850’s).  He transformed this ugly and useless thing into a huge flower-pot in which a beautifully tamed bamboo copse now thrives.  I recommend this elegant solution both for the perfection of the results and for its inexpensiveness—once you have amortized the cost of building the pool, of course.   The situation is not unlike that attendant upon Bo-Bo’s discovery of roast pork in the famous essay by Charles Lamb.  But underground containment is not a possibility for us.  We are not dealing with a patch but a forest, and the only answer for us is an annual draconian slaughter of the offspring.

            Each year in early May, usually before the tenth, the bamboo starts sprouting.  One day you see nothing; the next long straight lines of shoots pop up everywhere adjacent to the bamboo groves, in the lawn, in the flower beds, already two or three inches high the first time you notice them.  From that time on, you can practically watch them grow, ever more phallic in appearance—sometimes two or three inches overnight.  The really spectacular growth comes later, after they reach three or four feet, but by then the stems at ground level are becoming tough and woody, dark green in color, and difficult to cut easily.  You can also hear them growing—intermittent, squeaky, slightly railroadish sounds coming out of the dark of the spring night.  The young plants are cunningly made, covered in very tight overlapping paper-like wrappings, which they gradually shed as they climb ever upward.  In this they are like vegetable snakes.  They await their Stephen King to exploit the incipient horror of it all.  Cutting them to the ground in their sprout stage is only the first step.  They are likely to return in a year, but in a spindly state.  A second attack usually does the trick, and a third always does.

            This year’s campaign has a new twist.  Bamboo is of course edible, but I have never had confidence that our variety would be.  On Monday, however, I had a revelatory experience.  Our private lot abuts fifteen or twenty acres of “common land” shared by all the houses in the neighborhood.  Scattered throughout these acres are several other lush bamboo groves.  Just beyond my southern stone boundary wall is a large field.  As I was working at the bottom of my lawn,  I was surprised to see in this field a large black SUV with New York plates.  This was a most curious sight, and also highly suggestive of transgression.  Only large lawnmowers and heavy tree-care machines ever appear on the common ground, through which there is no actual vehicular road.  A private sports-utility vehicle could not have been more out of place on one of the great lawns of Central Park; but I go with the flow.  Later I saw two young, maskless Chinese women, both carrying heavy bags filled with the severed tips of bamboo sprouts, coming out of the woods.  In thus identifying them, I refer not to nationality, of which I have no knowledge, but to the probable national origin suggested by their physical appearance, the language they were speaking, and the vegetable loot they were hauling.  When they saw me, and realized that I had observed them, one of them dropped her heavy bag and both ran toward the SUV.  Then a middle-aged Chinese man appeared from I know not where, scooped up the discarded bag, and also rushed to the vehicle.  The guilty conscience needs no accuser.  Hand in the cookie jar doesn’t do justice.  You would have thought I had stumbled upon a major heist in progress at the First National Bank.  The black car took off at as high speed as risk of breaking an axle in rough terrain would allow, across the field, through a bumpy vacant lot, and then (out of sight to me) to a paved road and successful escape.  It seems clear that these desperadoes were unaware that my attitude, should I have been capable of one other than astonishment, would have been of gratitude for the their help in controlling the Green Menace.  I also concluded that if the Great Bamboo Sprout Caper was worthy of the automotive drama of The French Connection, we must have some pretty great bamboo sprouts.  So I set aside a promising bunch from my own back yard, and I’ll steam some for lunch tomorrow.

with thanks for several photos by Joan Fleming and Lulu Fleming-Benite