Another crisis of our own making

Well ‘crisis’ might be just a titch inaccurate. It’s more like “The Little Shop of Horrors” but not musical and not all that amusing. This one is called bamboo or rather Bamboo because it demands attention and a capital letter. When we moved to this house, 8 years ago, I decreed that I did not want the typical pyramidalis hedge between our front balcony and what sometimes is a busy street. Pyramidalis is like a black hole in space, sucking the life and love out of everything in sight. We have some in the back garden and they are much bigger than I ever wanted them to be and they are BORING. It’s a functional enough tree and ubiquitous in our part of the planet, but really drab and unimaginative.

We wanted something evergreen and relatively quick growing as well as hardy enough to withstand our occasional snow events. We’d ‘done’ photinia and I was feeling a bit jaded about it despite its very good qualities because it tends to attract tent caterpillars which is a big ugh for me and it is also rather dark. “Let’s have bamboo!” says I to long-suffering Jim who has to execute my many plans. We’d had bamboo before and thought we knew the pitfalls; we love it but being of the itchy feet clan we’ve never had it for as long as eight years in one location. BTW, there are two categories of bamboo, running and clumping. “Running” bamboo does just that, rampantly romping through entire neighbourhoods and making enemies of the perfectly nice people who live in adjacent postal codes. We had learned all about running bamboo, the hard way.

year one of the hedge, circa 2003

So, we planted 7 biggish “clumping” bamboos in a contained garden bed between our driveway and the street. The variety was pretty much guaranteed to develop slowly and to top out at 16 feet in about 10 years. You would think we’d know better by now than to walk down the path of believing what the nursery tag says. There was the Miss Kim lilac, a dwarf variety that would be 4-6 feet high in 10 years (they always say 10 years). Well that little gem grew to 10 feet in about 5 minutes and eventually committed suicide when we tried to move it. Did I say ‘we’ tried to move it? That would be Jim again, not we, after I whined and snivelled for 2 years about the space the lilac was wasting. If he had only listened to me when I first wanted it taken out it would have been quite a bit smaller and oh so much less work. But I digress. 
 From the balcony, 2010

So picture this gorgeous chartreuse green hedge rustling in any breeze and looking very light and lively for the first 6 years. One of the many good features of bamboo besides that they look great, have no bugs, and self mulch, is that they only grow once a year. They are evergreen but it is only in June/July that they put up new canes so you can really see what is happening because it is all at once. I am getting to the crisis! About two years ago I began to get a bit worried watching the canes grow 12 inches a day and noticed that some of them were approaching timber size rather than the light and airy of which I am so fond. Last year, Jim’s brow began to get quite furrowed as he fought the roots shooting out one end of the ‘contained’ area, and we found shoots poking up through the concrete seams in the driveway.  Recently I asked him if the sprig of bamboo I could see sticking out of our sprinkler system shut-off box was left over from the annual pruning (I forgot to say that we have to have 3-4 feet taken off the top of the bamboo every year now to keep it below our view and our gardener told me the other day he has to bring in help and bigger equipment for next year because it has outpaced his capability!) or if it could possibly be attached to a root. Well I know you know the answer to that question!

Jim hard at it, and mountains of cut bamboo canes. Notice how I am safely indoors taking photos from the kitchen window?

Jim spent the better part of two days hacking out the compacted roots at the other end of the ‘container’, and trimming out about 1/10th of the standing canes to re-expose a row of heathers.

For $3000.00 and a year of empty dirt we can have the whole hedge removed, (the process involves backhoes and hard labour and is NOT guaranteed) but what would we plant? The canes make the absolute best trellises for sweet peas, an idea I stole from Butchart Gardens, small birds love the refuge, and our hedge is a landmark. My nephew was coming by bus from the ferry and the driver knew exactly where “the house with the bamboo” was. For free I can send Jim out on “shoot patrol” every summer to try to keep it under control (you can tell I should have been a Brigadier General or Admiral I’m so good at delegating). So for the time being the bamboo stays and as I keep saying to Jim, “we can always move”. If we find any shoots coming up inside the house, just kidding I hope, you can bet I’ll be letting you know all about it. Actually you’ll hear me screaming from here to wherever you are!

And on a completely different note, we think Chelsea Grey, Benjamin Moore, is a very nice change from the navy blue walls, not that we actually have many walls when it comes down to it.