A clumping bamboo - rhizomes will not run sideways.
Minimum soil depth required for a healthy plant = 1'
Unrestrained rhizome depth in moist soil = 2'
Bought as a small plant at a nursery in
Canton, China by Dr. McClure in the early 1940's, taken to Puerto Rico & planted in the USDA growing
grounds. Years later he came back & was amazed at how big it had become.
In the 1980's Dr. Soderstrom examined the flowers, felt it might be a form of B. tuldoides &
devoted quite a bit of USDA research into attempting to prove that premise.
A mysterious vigorous clumping plant.
It has 2 modes of growth. (1) Large, straight, tall culms. (2) Shorter, knobby culms. No one has
determined what causes the difference. Sometimes type
(1) will turn into type (2), and vice-versa. Anyway, plants sold with
this name are very mixed in size and habit of growth, so much so that I
hesitate to guarantee how big or what the mature plant will look like.
We found 70' tall clumping timber bamboo near a Frank Lloyd Wright house in
Pasadena with the original gardener intact. He planted bambusa
ventricosa with bellies in the 1920's. The canes are 5" in
diameter, straight, widely spaced and have no bellies.
Talk about vigorous plants,
the Eggplant That Ate Chicago or The Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes! This plant could star in an X-rated
sex/sci-fi time-delay MTV flick called "HOW GREEN IS MY BELLY?" An androgynous bamboo wearing ladies
underwear is featured, along with its seductive lady caretaker.
Bosoms & bellies dissolve & reform constantly while students, gardeners & mad
scientists cavort, celebrating one unexpected transmogramation after another.
Everybody's first
favorite Bamboo - if it gets out of control, grows too big too fast or eats the cat, dig it up & send
it to us, we'll take all we can get, especially when it has those knobby swollen bellies.
The problem with this is that when you think you have the answer, the plant changes its mind & reverts. Mark Hooten has
grown a plant in boggy soil at the Edison Plantation in Florida with knobby culms. We have
'normal' 15 gallon pots 12' high which, even when watered heavily, will
occasionally put out a heavily knobby dwarfed culm. Kioshi Yoshida gave
us a dwarf heavily knobby plant in a 15 gallon pot from Florida Gideon stock, under our care it put
out 'normal' tall straight canes.
Did McClure know what he was doing when he
started this madness? Did Soderstrom understand what was
happening? Do we have an answer? No. Maybe you can figure it out.
Jean Harrington grew a 25' tall plant from a
small pot in St Pete, Florida in 2 years. It suffered only minor damage when hit with 27
degrees overnight in 1995.
15 gallon pots were installed in 2000 at the corner of
Stuart and Pennsylvania in Santa Monica - I understand it was not a good
choice of variety by the contractor and they are kept cut down as a hedge
plant near the property line.
