Now, up where I live, there is only one bamboo that can really grow. Fargesia Nitida, a clumping Chinese mountain bamboo that is hardy to zone 5.
The thing about bamboo, it doesn’t flower, it doesn’t flower for decades, a century, then it flowers and dies. this makes it very very very hard to hybridize bamboo because the generation period is so long.
It also has a bit of a plant memory, when you take a clone, a cutting, from bamboo, it isn’t “born again” it is the same age as the original. So my 6 or 7 year old clump of Fargesia Nitida, which was finally getting big, was really like 100 years old since it was an original from the first discovered clump. I knew this was possible, because Fargesia Nitidas have been flowering worldwide in recent years, but I was hoping…
Anyways, so now it will die, because once bamboos flower, they die. The seeds can be valuable though, because, they’re a once in a 100 year harvest. But I will have to start all over again, and that does kind of suck.
The thing about bamboo, it doesn’t flower, it doesn’t flower for decades, a century, then it flowers and dies. this makes it very very very hard to hybridize bamboo because the generation period is so long.
It also has a bit of a plant memory, when you take a clone, a cutting, from bamboo, it isn’t “born again” it is the same age as the original. So my 6 or 7 year old clump of Fargesia Nitida, which was finally getting big, was really like 100 years old since it was an original from the first discovered clump. I knew this was possible, because Fargesia Nitidas have been flowering worldwide in recent years, but I was hoping…
Anyways, so now it will die, because once bamboos flower, they die. The seeds can be valuable though, because, they’re a once in a 100 year harvest. But I will have to start all over again, and that does kind of suck.
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