Deborah's Garden

An Ode to Bamboo

We love our bamboo. We have a few stands of clumping bamboo in the back yard. We dug it up from the wild, and trasnplanted it several years ago, and amazingly, it survived.

In the front yard, we planted the rampant, agressive, running bamboo. The type everyone tells you never to plant. We planted that around five years ago. Just as they say, it slept, crept, and finally leapt. We didn't mind--it provided the privacy we sought.

In September 2004 we discovered an added benefit--we're convinced it saved our lives. Running straight up to our house is a road that ends almost at the sea. When the waves from Hurrican Ivan came rolling in, carrying the debris from all our neighbors' houses, the only thing to break them was the bamboo. We still wound up with docks, sofas and fridges on our front lawn, but I think without something to take the power out of the waves a lot of that stuff might have wound up inside the house. It probably wasn't a good idea that WE were inside the house that night, but that's another story.

So if some shoots come up in odd places, we can just cut them back. The bamboo has earned its place in my garden.

Anyhow, it also provides a handy hiding spot to overhear the comments of passers-by when they discuss the wild colors we painted our exterior.