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There’s a lot to love about bamboo.
Thousands of lucky San Franciscans will soon be walking through a bamboo forest on their way to and from towering glass buildings in the city’s Mission District. Groves of giant Japanese timber bamboo (Phyllostachys bambusoides) are a stunning horticultural statement in a 5.4-acre park atop the new Transbay Transit Center, scheduled for completion later this year. It’s just one more sign of bamboo’s increasing popularity, despite its bad reputation.
The park, long and skinny, is 70 feet aboveground and extends four blocks, with public access by bridges that connect with adjacent skyscrapers, by gondola from street level, or by escalator, elevators, and stairways inside and outside the building. Adam Greenspan, ASLA, a partner at PWP Landscape Architecture, explains that no matter what level people are on, “we wanted them to see that there was an inhabitable landscape up on the roof.”
The dominant feature of the Transit Center is a light tower that extends from the grand concourse at street level up to the roof, where its glass dome is surrounded by bamboo. Greenspan says he selected Japanese timber bamboo because it allows for “transparency and translucency,” and when you’re inside the building, “you get a bit of filtered light through foliage and through stems and culms.” Up on the roof is a “transparent scrim of green.” The bamboo is planted in a concrete basin about four feet deep, which sequesters the bamboo’s rhizomes so they cannot stray.
Phyllostachys is one of the “running” bamboos that can be invasive, and it’s at the heart of the phobia about them. It’s often planted to screen out neighboring views, but unless it’s properly contained, it spreads aggressively and sometimes even breaks up concrete driveways. Eric Groft, FASLA, principal at Oehme, van Sweden (OvS), says, “Bamboo strikes fear in everyone, as soon as you say the word. But there is bamboo, and there is bamboo.”
Partial elevation of San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center roof garden with a grove of Japanese timber bamboo. Image courtesy of PWP Landscape Architecture.
There are more than 1,600 species of bamboo worldwide, temperates and tropicals, clumpers and runners. Some bamboos tolerate winters as far north as USDA Zone 4; others thrive in the heat and humidity of USDA Zone 8 and higher. The clumpers spread slowly in a radial fashion and are not considered problematic. The runners spread by sending out rhizomes and, depending on the species, spread slowly or very quickly.
A number of municipalities have banned running bamboo, but growers and designers think that’s a mistake. Noah Bell, the manager of Bamboo Garden nursery in North Plains, Oregon, says people tend to think of bamboo as one single plant, but different species behave in vastly different ways. Most of the runners are temperate bamboos, and the ones people fear most include Phyllostachys, Sasa, Shibataea, Pseudosasa, and Pleioblastus. Bell says running bamboos can easily be contained with a biannual maintenance program of pruning or mowing. Groft of OvS says “blatantly banning the plant” simply doesn’t work: “Nature’s going to win, no matter how much you try to legislate.”
For evergreen screening in small gardens, OvS sometimes uses Phyllostachys in stainless steel containers, and they planted a slower running Sasa ground-cover bamboo on a new project in Sagaponack, New York. “If there’s a qualified landscape architect on the project who can use it with control or respect, that’s the critical thing,” Groft says.
At OvS, Fargesia, the most cold-hardy of the clumpers, has been a go-to specimen since the firm’s inception. The late Wolfgang Oehme brought Blue Fountain bamboo (Fargesia nitida) to the United States from Germany in the 1950s. With a beautiful bluish hue and arching habit, it was Oehme’s favorite plant, often used as a focal point outside a window, and it soon took off among designers. But F. nitida is now in the midst of its 100-year gregarious flowering cycle, which means that all bamboos of a specific species—no matter where—flower, produce seed, and die.
OvS now designs with a slightly smaller bamboo, F. rufa, the toughest of the cold-hardy clumpers. Bamboo Garden in Oregon has collected seed from F. nitida and cultivated new plants, but Bell is watching for unique characteristics to emerge from the 100 or so plants they’ve propagated thus far. In the meantime, he’s promoting F. robusta ‘Campbell,’ a new, rare species that has checkerboard white and dark green culms, and Fargesia sp. ‘Jiuzhaigou,’ which has a feathery, delicate leaf and culms. Its branches turn bright cherry red at certain times of the year.
Beyond the urban landscape, there are vast possibilities for bamboo, says Susanne Lucas, president of the American Bamboo Society and CEO of the World Bamboo Organization. Lucas notes that bamboos range from low ground covers just a foot or so high to tall timber varieties used for construction.
Dendrocalamus giganteus (giant bamboo), a tropical clumper. Photo by Shea Christine Photography.
Bamboo is a grass, one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth. Some species sprout up as much as one meter daily. Animals shelter from predators among its woody stems. Humans fashion myriad items from bamboo canes: fishing poles, chopsticks, skewers, flutes, rafts, even textiles. Large timber bamboos are processed for textiles, flooring, furniture, plywood, bridges, blinds, and scaffolding. They have the same tensile strength as steel and a compressive strength greater than concrete.
Bamboo is a renewable resource, regenerating when harvested and maturing within three to four years. It absorbs carbon at four times the rate of hardwood trees and produces up to 35 percent more oxygen. Lucas says there are large industrial investigations under way in terms of carbon trading and establishing plantations on degraded lands. She is particularly enthusiastic about the three bamboos native to the United States, all of the genus Arundinaria, or cane, which in precolonial times covered thousands of acres in South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and south to Arkansas. The native bamboos could be used for roadside reclamation and purification of contaminated soils, she suggests, and they would also be great for wildlife.
In tropical zones, Lucas says, there are “phenomenal bamboos.” Raymond Jungles, FASLA, would agree. He used more than 20 varieties of tropical clumpers at the Golden Rock Inn on the West Indies island of Nevis. “Bamboos make a special statement in a garden, giving movement and sound, shadow, and grace,” he says. Among his favorites are some of the big timber bamboos that create a forestlike effect and have “colorful new shoots when new canes are forming.” Jungles plants bamboo for privacy screens, wind barriers, erosion control, and as specimens. “Some bamboo is good to block things out in the background and fill space,” he notes, and others are used simply “to walk under and enjoy the different characteristics of the canes.”
Greenspan of PWP Landscape Architecture likes Mexican weeping bamboo (Otatea acuminata ssp. aztecorum) and its fine-textured leaves. He says it’s “soft-looking, almost like a weeping willow.” Tropical blue bamboo (Bambusa chungii) is another favorite, often used as a focal point. It’s a 30-foot-high bamboo, and its two-inch culms are a steely blue. “It has a very delicate look,” he says, “but it’s the powdery blue colored stems which are really amazing.”
Robert Saporito, the owner of Tropical Bamboo Nursery & Gardens in Loxahatchee, Florida, says that following a series of hurricanes, Floridians discovered that bamboos are flexible and very durable in storms. After the state’s real estate boom led to vertical building—homes of three stories or more—people are looking for privacy. “The only real solution is bamboo,” he says. Saporito’s website notes that most of the tropical bamboo species he carries are somewhat new to the United States, and many of the most desirable species have been here only a few years.
Both Saporito and Noah Bell of Bamboo Garden believe bamboo is growing in popularity among homeowners, landscape architects, and designers. As Bell puts it, “It’s something new to experiment with, it has an interesting modern look to it, and it’s become a symbol of sustainability and abundance.”
Bambusa chungii (tropical blue bamboo) is a favorite of Raymond Jungles, FASLA. Image courtesy of Raymond Jungles, Inc.
Some landscape architects have long been aware of bamboo’s positive attributes. Twenty years ago, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. (MVVA) installed a number of bamboos in the Vera List Courtyard at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Principal Laura Solano, ASLA, explains that Van Valkenburgh, “such a plants person,” wanted to make a “first foray into bamboo.” They brought in the American Bamboo Society’s Susanne Lucas as a consultant, and she was able to deliver the unexpected: Among the bamboos at the New School are dwarf fernleaf bamboo (Pleioblastus distichus), a tough ground cover with fern or palmlike leaves; kuma bamboo grass (Sasa veitchii), a taller ground cover that has long, fat leaves of dark green with pure white edges; and umbrella bamboo (Fargesia murielae), with light blue new shoots and a soft, umbrellalike canopy of evergreen leaves.
MVVA is not in the least bit reluctant to plant running bamboos. Solano says more education is needed so that bamboo is not mindlessly branded as invasive. The city “is a terrific place for bamboo because it thrives in so many tough conditions, and it’s perfectly happy to be constrained by an overabundance of pavement.”
Solano is also partial to bamboo because of the way it looks. “It can supercharge the way that a garden or landscape feels,” she explains. “Nothing moves quite as beautifully in the wind as tall bamboo culms or as amusingly as the bouncy branches on clumping bamboo stands of some Fargesia species.”
Designers at MVVA use a lot of pygmy bamboo (Pleioblastus pygmaeus). It’s “a tried-and-true workhorse for ground cover,” Solano says. She’s also drawn to Sasa bamboo, with its “long, fat leaves,” perfectly appropriate “even in small gardens.”
“One of the most surprising but one of the most beneficial aspects to bamboo is that it’s evergreen,” Solano says. “So to have something that is broader-leafed like bamboo is—not needle-based—is just a great delight to discover in the middle of winter. The way that snow or even rain falls and clings to its leaves is just spectacular.”
Jane Berger is a writer and professional landscape designer in Washington, D.C.
Last May, when I began the first of two courses with William (Bill) Cullina, the President and CEO of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, the student sitting next to me in class had a copy of his book Understanding Perennials: A New Look at an Old Favorite (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) with her and noted that many of the images he was showing as part of his lecture were in the book. I already had Understanding Perennials on my “wish list” at the public library; that night when I got home, I put a hold on it and picked it up within the week. By the time I had finished the first chapter, I had gone online to buy my own copy; by the time I had read half of it, it had become one of my top five favorite garden books.
Cullina sets the scene in Understanding Perennials by positing the world of plants as an alien culture and gardeners as “immigrants to the kingdom of plants.” Some gardeners are like tourists who never make much of an effort to learn the language or culture of the place they are visiting, “developing a rude sort of horticultural sign language that depends heavily on conjecture and leaves more than a fair share of casualties….” Others are more like permanent residents who are trying to assimilate, “learning some of the basic customs and phrases from gardening books and university night classes.” Only a rare few truly immerse themselves in the alien culture, becoming as fluent as native speakers and really understanding plants. (pp. 4-5) Cullina seems to believe that most of his readers will be in the second group, and his goal is to help us move closer to true immersion in the culture of the plant kingdom. The problem, as he sees it, is that we are usually trying to learn about this kingdom and its culture from other immigrants, but the best teachers are the natives (plants themselves). He is convinced that the best tool for learning from plants is science, but that many would-be students are thwarted by the arcane language and densely complex prose of science. This book is intended to be a kind of cultural broker.
What I have aimed for is a work that translates the language and culture of plants and the language of science into words and concepts we can understand, and to do it with as much clarity, poetry, and purpose as I can muster.” (p. 9)
Understanding Perennials does not shy away from the language of science; after all, Cullina’s mission is to make us more comfortable with a scientific understanding of plants. But he tries to use scientific terminology in ways that will not alienate a lay reader. Key terms are collected in a four-page glossary at the end of the book. In the main text, they are always set in a context of language and images familiar to a gardener. Cullina makes horticultural science personal by tying it to his own experiences in his own garden and in the greenhouse at Garden in the Woods (where he was in charge of plant propagation before he came to Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens) and to his own experiments with plants. The book is chock-full of full-color photographs, and these images also make the lay gardener feel at home. But these are not just pretty pictures of pretty flowers in attractive settings. A series of images on page 35, for example, documents an experiment in which Cullina deprived a heart-leafed aster (Symphyotrichum cordifolium) of water and recorded what happened to the roots and the above-ground plant as it dried out – a powerful lesson about how drought damages a plant and why it may not recover immediately when it rains. In another example of science made accessible, an infrared photo of a potentilla flower on page 111 shows us the color patterns that a bee can see but that human eyes cannot.
Cullina also makes horticultural science accessible by tying it to personal experience and family life. A discussion of aphids, for example, includes the following;
Aphids are primarily after the protein in the phlom [sic], so most of the sugars are processed and secreted out their rear in the form of honeydew – as euphemistic a word for excrement as you are likely to hear. The next time I change the twins’ diapers, I’m going to call it “collectin’ the honeydew.’’
The structure of Understanding Perennials takes us from a chapter that introduces and defines perennials, differentiating them from annuals in growth and reproductive cycles, through a series of four chapters (on roots, leaves, stems, and flowers and seeds) that examine the anatomy and physiology of perennials, to chapters about gardening with perennials (on pests and diseases, botanical names, garden design, using cultivation methods that understand how plants interact with their environments, and methods of propagation). This is indeed an “owner’s manual” for perennials, and it is a book that no gardener who seriously wants to understand perennials should be without.
Filed under: favorite books, Garden Books, garden science, plants Tagged: Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, Garden Books, horticultural science, perennials, William Cullina 
Technologist landscape architects rejoice—the November issue of LAM is packed with imagined scenarios, myth breakers, and tantalizing possible futures for urban design. Whether or not autonomous vehicles will allow for utopian cities of tomorrow depends on careful planning and policies today, says writer Brian Barth. And the future of autonomous vehicles might not look as green as we’re imagining. A new landscape by Ki Concepts on Honolulu’s Ford Island—site of the Pearl Harbor attack in World War II—weaves the richly layered history of the site into a sleek, cohesive design. And a new streetscape redesign by CRSA in the Sugar House business district of Salt Lake City turns a large thoroughfare into an inviting multimodal streetscape.
In Materials, Jane Berger discusses the stigma—and benefits—of the often-misunderstood bamboo. And in Tech, geodesign unites academics and agriculturists in the pursuit of the most optimal yield for their yearly crops. All this plus our regular Books, Now, and Goods columns. The full table of contents for November can be found here.
As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.
Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be posting November articles as the month rolls out.
Credits: “The Retraining of Salt Lake City,” CRSA; “Before and After Pearl Harbor,” Alan Karchmer; “Dream Cars,” Illinois Institute of Technology; “Raising Canes,” OvS; “Models of Collaboration,” Len Kne.
