Regarding Chloe Lieberman’s response to someone interested in planting bamboo [“Riot of Color, Courtesy of Spring,” March 26, Xpress], I like to say gardening is a lot like cooking. Everybody puts different things into it, but the results are not always good. As a landscape garden designer/contractor for 45 years, I have reined in bamboo way too much.
I stare out my window at a large stand of timber bamboo that takes a huge amount of my time to keep it from encroaching on my neighbor’s house, shading and choking out the trees. It falls over when it gets heavy with snow and blocks the road and pulls up the asphalt on our private road. The dead canes need to be culled out, and I could go on and on about the horrors.
Clumping or running bamboo is a hazard, and it gets out of control, especially if you ignore it — unless you are in the bamboo-growing business, and I have seen some great bamboo farms that grow it for commercial use. For erosion control, there are so many native plants that do a much better job that are pollinators, that sustain our local wildlife.
Bamboo running or clumping will grow over and under physical barriers. I don’t care how deep you place a barrier. My employees and I have spent hours trying to contain clients’ existing bamboo.
Don’t do it unless you have the time and the energy or are feeding pandas. I love bamboo, and one of my favorite Japanese gardeners and I would talk about all of the types of bamboo and how one species in the late ’70s went to seed all over the world at the same time and died out.
Put it in a large container, root prune it periodically and create a screen that way. Save yourself hours of grief.
— Sharon Sumrall
Former Urban Forestry Commission member
Asheville
Editor’s note: See “Bamboo is Not a Good Idea for WNC,” in this week’s issue for Lieberman’s response to both letters.
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