 |
|
|
|
|
|
     | |||||
 |
|
 |
|||
 | |||||
|
- - - - - - - - - - - -
March 6, 2000 | I acceded to their request, but grudgingly. I was new to the neighborhood -- it was my first spring in my new home -- and I wanted more bamboo, not less. The bamboo had been planted by a previous owner who wanted a barricade blocking his view of the apartment building; I was of the opinion that there was still plenty left that could benefit from obscurement. I told the women they could pick just a few shoots. But I felt selfish, and the quizzical look in their eyes, as if they couldn't comprehend how anyone could be stupid enough not to want their bamboo harvested, failed to improve my spirits. The rainy season faltered two months early that spring, and the bamboo shoots that escaped the clutches of the scavengers withered and died. I felt sorry for the poor bamboo, so obviously unfit to flourish in the harsh Bay Area climate. I watered the rest of the grove throughout the summer, and idly wondered whether I should dose the bamboo with a mass treatment of fertilizer. But the bamboo spirits had just been biding their time. The next winter, one of the wettest El Niņo deluges of the entire century pummeled California. One day, when the torrent paused to grab a breath, I strolled through the yard and noted, with a sense of surprise quickly graduating to alarm, that 50 or 60 new shoots had erupted out of the moist earth, some as far as 6 feet away from the main thicket. Most of them were an inch and a half to 2 inches in diameter at the base, significantly thicker than the average already-existing full-grown stalks, or "culms." Two weeks later, I was shocked to see that a wicker chair left sitting near the grove had suddenly been hoisted several feet in the air by a fast-moving culm. After a few more days had passed I looked again: The culms were growing at a rate of several feet a week. "It is a most impressive sight to see the new sprouts of a bamboo grove, shooting spike-like out of the ground like Cadmus' crop of dragon's teeth," wrote one bamboo-fascinated Westerner who lived in China around the turn of the 19th century. I could not agree more -- especially after I learned that bamboo grows to its full height (in this case, 30 feet) in a single season. (One species has even been clocked at 47.6 inches of growth in a single 24-hour period.) I suddenly wanted to call my Chinese visitors back. The bamboo, in the space of a few weeks, had transformed itself from a pleasing, decorative and useful adornment into an invading army. The metaphor was more apt than I knew. Bamboo falls under a subclass of grasses that display "rhizome" reproductive habits; they are plants that propagate primarily through their root structure, rather than by seed or pollen. There are two main types of bamboo: clumping bamboo, which stays close to home, and so-called running bamboo, which botanists describe with no apparent sense of humor as "rampantly invasive." My bamboo was running bamboo. The main patch sent rhizome roots 1 inch thick in diameter shooting out in every direction, each capable of launching new culms every few inches. A bamboo patch has no central tap root to decapitate, and any shred of rhizome left undemolished can relaunch the entire patch. No wonder Li Khan, the 13th century author of one of China's greatest treatises on bamboo, tells us that the proper word to describe the extending rhizomes of the running bamboo is xingbian -- "on the march." My running bamboo was advancing on the foundation of my home. The prospect of rhizomes ripping my basement apart did not thrill me. I was even less delighted to overhear the neighbors discussing my bamboo. The rhizomes had penetrated the fence between us, scooted under 4 feet of concrete and started sending troops of sprouts up through cracks in their pavement. Shortly after discovering how quickly the bamboo was spreading, I retrieved a spade from my basement and began to dig at the base of one of the culms. But before I reached the rhizome I stumbled into a spaghettilike intertwining network of much smaller roots, or rootlets, that originated in the culm and also radiated out from the rhizomes. Together, the rhizomes and rootlets were replacing the uppermost foot of topsoil in that part of the garden with a woody, impenetrable mass easily capable of denting my spade. I paused in reflection. The wind ruffled the bamboo leaves -- a gentle rustle that in Chinese culture has long been considered an indicator of elegance and gracious living but to me seemed a most sinister susurrus. Still, even as my fear began to mount, I found it difficult not to admire the ornery, gnarly survival of the bamboo. Praised throughout millenniums in Asia for combining strength with flexibility, bamboo is clearly one of nature's great achievements. If I had known then what I now know -- that a bamboo grove was one of the only living things to survive the atomic blast on Hiroshima, or that a bamboo forest is considered one of the safest places to be in an earthquake (because the interlocking rhizomes hold the ground together) -- I would no doubt have quailed at the prospect of ever overcoming the graceful intruder. But at the time, I was just impressed with how tough the plant was. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Next page |