In my opinion, the story (below) is far superior, but I've also made a short video about the joys of bamboo, if you prefer that route:

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Don't Get BAMBOOzled!

Bamboo is like a boat: A thing best enjoyed at someone else’s house, when it’s not actually yours to take care of. Both boats and bamboo plants are a hassle and require a lot of maintenance, and yet because they are so fun and engaging, you might still think you want one. That is, until you have to come home to the enormous and unwieldy thing on your property every day. It will eventually take over your life, and not because it is so darn fun; but because it will triple (If not quadruple) in size, year after year, horizontally expanding its perimeter outwards until it is the only thing left in your yard. Clearly, I’m not talking about the boat anymore. That would be great news, you’d have a yacht in no time; but it's not so great news when we are talking about an invasive species of plant that literally knows no boundaries.

I happen to have a small bamboo forest of my own. It was already pretty well established when I bought my house many years ago, but now the pipe-sized stalks emerge from the ground with such girth and vigor that I have watched them:

- Burst through the solid wood planks of my deck.

- Burst through the solid rubber floor mats in my shed.

- Push straight through the solid metal roof of my gazebo.

- Intertwine themselves in whatever object is touching the ground (a bike, a grill) and lift it several inches off the ground in a matter of days.

Upon inheriting this bamboo forest, we had to essentially start by chopping the stalks to the ground, because due to the neglect of its previous stewards, there were all sort of things inextricably tangled up in it: a bicycle, a chair, two grills, etc., all just floating surreally up off the ground about eye-level, like someone had flipped the switch in an anti-gravity chamber. I assumed that the previous owners must have let things go, really get out of hand, for many, many, years. Little did I know, it was more like weeks. In the spring, the bamboo will pop up in every imaginable place, and grow several inches each day. Every real estate agent within a 2-mile radius of our neighborhood probably wants to scream, “Burn it all to the ground! I swear I had the property looking great yesterday, how is it all back overnight?!”

Interestingly enough, the main thing that kills bamboo, is other bamboo. It needs full sun to survive, and so its rapid growth is like a mad race to reach the sun before the other stalks growing next to it get there first, and create too much shade for the slow-poke stalk to survive. This means that at all times, your bamboo forest will be riddled with the dead stalks that didn’t make it, and it’s up to you to figure out how to get those stalks out. (And then what to do with it all once you do.)

Every year I produce so much chopped down bamboo that it always encourages friends and family -- especially my mother, who loves rattan patio furniture -- to suggest, “You should make something fun out of it!”

Yeah. You try making something. It’s not as easy as it looks. At first, I naively thought that in no time at all I’d probably be the toast of the town, what with all the gorgeous new bamboo dining furniture I’d be creating. The best I achieved was a rudimentary, wonky lattice abomination, pictures of which mostly prompted people to ask, “Was it really windy or something that day?"

Sure. So windy.

It couldn’t be that crafting bamboo furniture by hand is an intricate and nuanced skill, passed down through generations… It would be like assuming every time you pass a group of cows, that the owners must sit down every night to a gorgeous spread of lovely cheeses on their table.

As much as I love my tropical bamboo forest, and the uncharacteristic (of Texas, anyway) ambience it lends to my yard, it might seem like I am advising you not to plant it.

And that’s because I am.

You can never get rid of it, not really, and every year there is approximately a two-month period where I have to set aside 15 minutes every day for “Bamboo Time.” This is where I go hunt around the yard and cut down all the waist-high bamboo that has grown up throughout the course of the day, since I left for work that morning. If "Bamboo Time" sounds like fun to you, then by all means, plant it.

“Can’t I contain it somehow?" people will often ask me. "I’ve heard of people burying metal troughs in the ground and planting the bamboo inside of those.”

Even if you are able to find some kind of military grade titanium trough (don’t skimp on this), I have seen firsthand the bamboo somehow find a way out of even that, and into the rest of the yard, nay, the neighborhood. What a fun Houdini-like mystery! So fun, in fact, that you and your neighbors will be solving this mystery for the rest of your lives. They’ll love you!

I have a lot of personal tips and tricks that I have developed over the years to manage my bamboo (notice I did not use the word “contain”) but I feel like other than just general dissuasion from planting it, my tips for dealing with a barrage of bamboo stalks, that constantly emerge from the ground already the size of a baseball bat, would be for a very niche audience.

So, if you ever find yourself considering whether or not to plant this delightfully fast-growing plant -- that the Chinese used to employ as a form of physical torture on their enemies -- my advice is, don’t. And if you ever see your neighbor planting this beautiful, majestic plant in the ground, and find yourself feeling jealous...again, don’t be. Just wait.

Why?

Because if you share a property line, you’re about to have bamboo too.

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My sick fascination with bamboo continues HERE!

And I talk about decorating with Buddha and Jesus HERE!