805 Brand in Glendale

First class rental office building.  When it first opened the owner installed Moso bamboo acquired from a well-know nursery near San Francisco.  It did not do well.  They hired us to study the problem.  I found it was installed in an atrium-type lobby against a tall glass wall facing west with 2000 foot-candles of light during the afternoon. The lobby was usually warm or even hot.  The plants were watered by a cleaning lady with a small push cart holding a few gallons of water.  I told them it needed a lot more water, more than the cleaning lady could supply.  They installed an automatic watering system, flooded the planters and  surrounding granite floor with overflow.  When they got the watering schedule right the person in charge of maintenance took a vacation.  The plants suddenly shot up with new growth.  The maintenance crew, having never seen new shoots pop us so fast, assumed they were weeds and quickly cut them all down.  Discouraged, in 1991 they dug out all the Moso and replaced them with our recommendation - vulgaris vittata.  Unfortunately they bought the plants from their maintenance crew, who put in transplants dug out of the Hawaiian national jungle.

In the photos you can see what happens with such plants.  The large diameter canes slowly turn grey and die, being slowly replaced by much smaller new shoots.  The  choice of vulgaris vittata for their atrium was a good one, but they should ask us how it should be done.