About Bamboo

When you are learning about bamboo it may come as a surprise that it is in fact grass. The group of a huge number of plant species that are 'bamboo' are perennial, evergreen, and part of the Poaceae family of grasses.

There are members in this group of bamboo plants that grow to be classified as gigantic species, most definitely the grass family's largest members. There are some species of bamboo that actually grow at a rate of around a metre every day.

Well over a thousand species of bamboo and 91 genera. Bamboo plants can be found growing domestically and commercially in countries right around the world and in varied climatic conditions, from the US to India, Africa, Europe, and even to the extremes such as Antarctica.

The plants grow in many countries across the globe from northern Australia to East Asia, from India to the USA, Europe and Africa... and even Antarctica.

In East Asia bamboo has an established and wide variety of uses, for example; food, building materials, and in gardens.

It is now fastly becoming more popular in the West for commercial and domestic uses.

With treatment, bamboo forms into a light, exceptionally durable, and very hard wood that is tough enough to be used for flooring, construction materials, furniture, and even building houses!

Uses

Bamboo grove / forest with road running through it

In some parts of the world it is an ideal evergreen plant in the garden and is popular for use in gardens as fencing, hedging, privacy screening, windbreaks, and ornamental or groundcover in gardening.

In countries with a tropical climate it is used for many purposes such as construction, clothing, flooring, bicycles, furniture, yarn and fabrics, knitting needles, carved bamboo pots and decorative arts and crafts, wind chimes, bedding and towels, bridges, walking sticks, chopsticks, food, toys, fencing, buckets, canoes, fishing rods, paper, martial arts weapons, and tattoo needles.

Learning about bamboo is fascinating and fun!

Bamboo can also be forced into different shapes when it is growing if the young shoots are grown through a square tube for example, or curled into a corkscrew shape.

New plants can be progagated by division, layering, cuttings, or growing from seed.

See my page on bamboo propagation methods.

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Environmentally Friendly

Finding out about bamboo is to discover a hugely versatile plant for gardens and landscape uses, but also to learn all the additional benefits of how it is used as an environmentally friendly material for manufacturing a wide variety of ancient and contemporary products.

The surface area of the leaves is high which enables the plant to remove carbon dioxide from earth's atmosphere at an efficient rate and generate oxygen to replace it.

Eco-friendly bamboo is a grass that grows at such a rate that it can be harvested within three to five years when it has become sufficiently woody and strong. This is much faster that growing periods for the majority of wood, twenty five years for most species and around fifty years for the majority of hardwoods to mature enough to be harvested.

Although the process of growing bamboo is fast and eco-friendly, there is still debate about exactly how eco-friendly the treatment and manufacturing processes are.