Sacred Plant (2011/11/22)
  It was shooting time in the garden, and that is what we had come to see: every spring, the buds on underground rhizomes suddenly pop out of the ground and begin to grow at an amazing rate. Phyllostachys nigra, the black bamboo, was sending up shoots about three inches in diameter and four feet tall. Within a month they would attain their full height — about 40 feet — but they wouldn’t get any thicker. Unlike tree trunks, bamboo canes do not grow in diameter; the following year’s new shoots will simply be a bit thicker, and so on, with each succeeding year.
   We wandered about the groves, riveted by those shoots — some pale green, some golden, others inky black and satiny smooth. No wonder this plant inspires creation myths. Pieces of bamboo were said to have been found around Buddha’s remains.“It’s probably the most sacred plant for everyone in the world, except the U.S., because of all that it does,” Ms. Heinricher said.Bamboo shoots can be eaten, parboiled or stir-fried if you pop them off underground, just before they emerge from the dirt. That’s one way to control your bamboo: eat it for dinner.
   I still wonder what happens if the responsible gardener moves away or dies. But bamboo is shallow-rooted. If you want to get rid of a grove, Ms. Heinricher said, you use a spade with a sharp edge to cut through the rhizomes; then shove the spade beneath the roots, which generally go about a foot down, and peel the whole mat off the ground.“I’ve dug up 40-foot canes, in 20-by-20 groves, that way,” she said.But that’s the flip side of an ecomaterial transcending its eco-ness: bamboo has the vague aura of being green-friendly but not too crunchy — trendy, in other words. Bamboo has become so well known, in fact, that Bergman, the architect, sometimes steers clients away from it. “I’ve had one or two instances,” he says, “where we’ve said, ‘It’s too done now.’ You don’t want to do something so of-the-moment that it dates the design.”
   I stared up at the 70-footers. Maybe I would have to come back in a year, to eat a few shoots, and to help Ms. Heinricher peel up a grove.All of this has happened at a time when eco-awareness has evolved into the sort of trend reducible to a Vanity Fair-friendly formulation like “green is the new black.” And of course, becoming an “it” material is a double-edged business. For starters, there isn’t just one kind of bamboo; there are about 1,400 species, according to Lynn Clark, a professor at Iowa State University who has studied bamboo for decades and is still discovering new species.
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