Bamboo
Bamboo includes Dendrocalamus sinicus, a giant whose single stalk can reach 46 m in length, 36 cm in diameter and 450 kg in weight. Yet every bamboo is a grass. Together they form the subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. The smallest bamboos stop at only several inches high when mature. Most are evergreen perennials, and they thrive in tropical and subtropical regions, especially in Asia. This documentary asks how a grass can grow at a pace few plants on Earth can match. It asks why some bamboos bloom just once in a century and then die. And it asks how one plant became a food, a writing surface, a scaffold, a weapon and a symbol of human character in so many cultures.
Arthrostylidium schomburgkii has stretches between its joints that run up to 5 m, a length exceeded only by papyrus. Kinabaluchloa wrayi manages up to 2.5 m. These stretches, called internodes, are usually hollow.
Conifers and dicot trees carry their water-conducting tissue in a cylinder between the bark and the wood. Bamboo, like other grasses, scatters its vascular bundles throughout the wall of the stalk. It also lacks the woody xylem of dicots. Without secondary growth, the stems of monocots such as palms and large bamboos stay columnar instead of tapering.
Bambusa tulda, from Bangladesh and adjoining India, has tested as high as 60,000 psi, or 400 MPa, in tensile strength. Bamboo's strength-to-weight ratio is similar to that of timber. Its strength generally matches a strong softwood or hardwood, and some species make an extraordinarily hard material.
More than 1,400 species of bamboo are placed in 115 genera. Bamboos were long treated as the most basal of the grasses, because of features such as bracteate, indeterminate flower clusters called pseudospikelets and flowers with three lodicules, six stamens and three stigmata. Molecular research changed that picture. Many tribes and genera once placed here now sit in other subfamilies, including the Anomochlooideae, the Puelioideae and the Ehrhartoideae. Bamboo now belongs to the BOP clade of grasses, where it is sister to the Pooideae, the bluegrasses and their relatives.
The Malay language probably supplied the word bamboo, passed along through Dutch or Portuguese, although the origin is uncertain.
Three clades, ranked as tribes, divide the bamboos along geographic lines. The Olyreae are the herbaceous bamboos of the New World. The Bambuseae are the tropical woody bamboos. The Arundinarieae are the temperate woody bamboos. The woody bamboos do not form a single natural group, because the tropical woody and herbaceous bamboos are sister to the temperate woody ones.
Chloroplast DNA, which reflects the maternal line of descent, agrees with this classification. The nuclear genome is more tangled, because ancient hybridization added subgenomes through a process called allopolyploidy. Herbaceous bamboos are diploid (HH). Temperate woody bamboos are tetraploid (CCDD), as are the neotropical woody ones (BBCC). The paleotropical woody bamboos carry six sets of chromosomes and are hexaploid (AABBCC).
Phyllostachys bambusoides, the Japanese giant timber bamboo, has been observed growing 120 cm in 24 hours. Other species have managed 91 cm in a day. That works out to almost 40 mm an hour, or about 1 mm every 90 seconds. A rhizome-dependent system, an underground network of stems, makes this pace possible. In many commonly cultivated temperate bamboos, a more typical rate is 30-100 mm per day during the growing period. Such speed, together with a tolerance for marginal land, makes bamboo a candidate for afforestation, carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation.
Three to four months is all a bamboo culm needs to reach its final height. Unlike a tree, each culm emerges from the ground at its full diameter. The shoot climbs without branching until it has reached most of its mature height. Only then do branches extend from the nodes and the leaves appear.
In the second year, the pulpy wall of the culm slowly hardens. During the third year it hardens further, and the shoot is a fully mature culm. Over the next 2-5 years, depending on species, fungus forms on the outside and eventually overcomes the culm. About 5-8 years after that, the fungal growth makes the culm collapse and decay. A culm never grows taller or wider in later years than it did in its first, and it does not replace growth lost to pruning or breakage. This short life means culms are ready for harvest and for construction within about three to seven years.
Some of the largest timber bamboos grow over 30 m tall, with diameters of 250-300 mm. A typical height range for common bamboos grown in the United States is 4.5-12 m. Anji County in China, known as the Town of Bamboo, offers climate and soil that produce some of the most valued bamboo poles in the world.
Many species flower only at intervals as long as 65 or 120 years, and flowering is both rare and unpredictable. Once it happens, the plant declines and often dies entirely. This is called mass flowering, or gregarious flowering, in which every plant of a cohort blooms over a span of several years. Plants grown by cloning from that cohort will bloom too, even if they were planted somewhere else.
The longest known interval is 120 years, recorded for Phyllostachys bambusoides. All plants of the same stock flower together, whatever the geography or climate, and then die. Guadua angustifolia, an commercially important bamboo, bloomed for the first time in recorded history in 1971. That suggests an interval well beyond 130 years.
Because neither place nor weather changes the schedule, researchers point to a kind of alarm clock in each cell. It signals the plant to divert all its energy into flowers and stop vegetative growth. The mechanism, and the evolutionary reason for it, remain largely a mystery.
In southern India and some regions of southwest China, the seeds of the dying plant are eaten as a grain called bamboo rice. Cooked, the seeds are reported to taste like wheat and look like rice, but they carry lower nutrient levels than both. They can also be pulverized into flour for cakes.
For people living near the plants, a flowering bamboo has long been read as a sign of impending famine. The likely cause is rats, which feed on the profusion of flowers, multiply, and then destroy much of the local food supply. Various species bloom in this way about every 28-60 years. The most recent such flowering began in May 2006, and it is recorded under the name Mautam.
Sakhalin, at 50 °N, marks the northern edge of bamboo in East Asia. From there the range runs south to northern Australia and west to India and the Himalayas. China, Japan, Korea, India and Australia all have several endemic populations. In Africa, bamboo occurs in small numbers and only in tropical areas, from southern Senegal to southern Mozambique and Madagascar. In the Americas, it grows from 47 °S in southern Argentina and the beech forests of central Chile. The range runs through the South American rainforests to the Andes in Ecuador near 14000 ft, with a noticeable gap through the Atacama Desert.
Most species are native to warm, moist tropical climates or warm temperate ones, but some reach cool mountains and highland cloud forests. Many tropical bamboos die at or near freezing. Hardier temperate species survive temperatures as low as -29 °C. In USDA zone 5, the hardiest bamboos typically defoliate and may lose all their above-ground growth, yet the rhizomes survive and send up shoots the next spring. From USDA zone 7 upward, most bamboo stays fully leafed out and green all year.
Three bamboo species, all in the genus Arundinaria, are native to the Southeastern United States. Their thickets, called canebrakes, once formed a dominant ecosystem in parts of the region, but they are now considered critically endangered ecosystems. Canada and continental Europe have no known native bamboo, though gardeners grow many species in both places.
Recent attempts at commercial growing have taken place in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa, especially in Rwanda. In the United States, several companies grow and distribute Phyllostachys nigra, called Henon, and Phyllostachys edulis, called Moso. In Brazil, a non-profit called CEBIS promotes a bamboo production chain, and the state of Paraná has passed a law encouraging bamboo culture.
Shen Kuo, a polymath of the Song dynasty who lived from 1031 to 1095, found petrified bamboo underground near Yan'an in Shaanxi province. The climate there is dry and northern. He used that evidence to support his geological theory of gradual climate change.
Bamboo spreads in two general patterns, called clumping and running. Clumping species have short underground rhizomes and expand their root mass slowly, much like ornamental grasses. Running species have long rhizomes that travel widely underground and send up new culms through the surface. Some send out runners of several meters a year, while others stay in the same area for long periods.
A study commissioned by the International Bamboo and Rattan Organization found that invasive bamboos are typically rhizome spreaders. Most commercially viable woody bamboos clump instead. In the United States, the National Invasive Species Information Center, an agency of the Department of Agriculture, lists golden bamboo, Phyllostachys aurea, as an invasive species. The harm includes raising soil pH, cramping and shading out native plants, hindering the spread of native seeds, altering food chains and siphoning nutrients from other plants. Bambusa vulgaris and Guadua tagoara are among other potentially invasive species that also spread mainly through their rhizomes.
The red panda can eat up to 9 lb of bamboo a day, which is also about its full body weight. Bamboo holds large amounts of protein and very little carbohydrate, and that makes it a food source for many animals. Soft shoots, stems and leaves are the major food of the giant panda of China, the red panda of Nepal and the bamboo lemurs of Madagascar.
Raw bamboo carries trace amounts of cyanide, at higher concentrations in the shoots. The golden bamboo lemur ingests many times the amount of taxiphyllin-containing bamboo that would be lethal to a human. Mountain gorillas of Central Africa also feed on bamboo, and they have been documented drinking bamboo sap that had fermented into something alcoholic. Chimpanzees and elephants in the region eat the stalks.
In Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Yunnan, China, the larvae of the bamboo borer moth, Omphisa fuscidentalis, feed on the pulp of live bamboo. The caterpillars are in turn considered a local delicacy. Some bamboo varieties with higher protein content are also used as livestock feed.
Taxiphyllin, a cyanogenic glycoside, is the toxin in newly emerged shoots, and levels are highest in the youngest. Boiling or steaming for at least 20 minutes, with several changes of water, breaks it down and releases hydrogen cyanide gas. After that, the shoots are harmless. Eaten raw or undercooked, they can cause acute cyanide poisoning, with nausea, dizziness, rapid heartbeat and in some cases coma or death. That is rare with the traditional methods of Asian cuisines. People with G6PD deficiency should avoid them altogether, even when cooked.
Gardeners have occasionally reported allergic reactions to the plant, from itchy rashes and red welts to swollen eyelids and breathing difficulties. The cause is unknown, although silica bodies, phenolic compounds and a fungal contaminant on the surface are suspects.
Fermented shoots are an important ingredient in cuisines across the Himalayas. In Assam, India, the fermented shoot is called khorisa. In Nepal, shoots fermented with turmeric and oil and cooked with potatoes make alu tama, a dish that usually accompanies rice. In Indonesia, thin slices are boiled in santan, thick coconut milk, with spices to make gulai rebung.
In Sambalpur, India, tender shoots are grated into juliennes and fermented to make kardi, a name derived from the Sanskrit karira. Kardi goes into amil, a sour vegetable soup. Shoots that have turned fibrous are fermented, dried and ground into a garnish called hendua. In Konkani cuisine, grated shoots called kirlu are cooked with crushed jackfruit seeds to make kirla sukke.
The sap of young stalks tapped in the rainy season can be fermented into ulanzi, a sweet wine. Bamboo leaves wrap steamed dumplings such as the zongzi of China. Cooks also use the hollows of larger stalks as pots, boiling soups and cooking rice in fresh stalks directly over a flame. Steamed tea is sometimes rammed into bamboo hollows to produce compressed forms of pu'er tea. In the Indian state of Sikkim, bamboo water bottles have been promoted to keep the state free from plastic bottles.
Ink on string-bound bundles of bamboo strips, called slips, survives from the fifth century BC, in the Warring States period of China. Earlier texts on other media suggest that some precursor of these slips was in use as early as the late Shang period, from about 1250 BC. Bamboo or wooden strips were the standard writing material during the early Han dynasty, and excavators have found them in abundance. Paper then began to displace them, and by the fourth century AD bamboo slips had been largely abandoned for writing in China.
Bamboo fiber has made paper in China since early times. A high-quality, handmade bamboo paper is still produced in small quantities, and a coarse grade is used to make spirit money in many Chinese communities. Bamboo pulp for printing and writing papers comes mainly from China, Myanmar, Thailand and India. The paper mills at Ballarpur, in Chandrapur, run on bamboo, and the most common species for paper are Dendrocalamus asper and Bambusa blumeana.
The average fiber length is similar to hardwoods, but the pulp behaves more like softwood pulp because of a very broad range of fiber lengths. In the forests of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Chhattisgarh in Central India, regular bamboo working circles supply mostly papermaking. Workers cut bamboo three years after germination, avoid cutting in the rainy season from July to September, and harvest broken and malformed culms first.
In olden times in India, writers used hand-made pens called kalam, or boru, cut from thin bamboo sticks 5-10 mm across and 100-150 mm long. A maker peeled one side and shaped a nib at the end, and the pen was then dipped in ink.
Bamboo fibers are very short, less than 3 mm, so they are not usually spun into yarn by a natural process. Textiles labeled as bamboo are usually rayon, made by breaking the fibers down with chemicals that include lye, carbon disulfide and strong acids. Retailers sold these products as bamboo fabric to cash in on bamboo's ecofriendly reputation. As of mid-2009, the Canadian Competition Bureau and the US Federal Trade Commission were cracking down on that labeling. Under both agencies' guidelines, such products must be labeled as rayon, with the optional qualifier "from bamboo".
A suspension bridge in the area of Qian-Xian, held up by bamboo, appears in writings dating back to 960 AD and may have stood since as far back as the third century BC. Continuous maintenance explains its survival. In China and India, builders made cables from split bamboo, or twisted whole culms that were pliable enough. Bamboo has also long served as scaffolding. China has banned the practice for buildings over six stories, but it remains in continuous use for skyscrapers in Hong Kong.
In the Philippines, the nipa hut has walls of split and woven bamboo, with slats and poles for support. Japanese architecture uses bamboo mainly as a supplement or decoration, in fencing, fountains, grates and gutters, because quality timber is abundant. Where water is nearby in remote parts of Asia, people raft with 8 to 12 poles of bamboo 3-5 years old, 6-7 m long. They lay the poles side by side to a width of about 1 m and pin them with a small bamboo pole pushed through a hole cut crosswise at each end. Floating houses rest on whole stalks tied together in a big bunch.
Timber for construction must be cut when culms reach their greatest strength and sap sugar is at its lowest, because high sugar speeds pest infestation. Photosynthesis peaks at midday and fills the sap with sugar, so many traditional practitioners prefer dawn or dusk on a waning moon. After cutting, growers reduce the sap by leaching. One method leans the culms against the clump for one to two weeks, until the leaves turn yellow. Another weighs culms down in a running stream for three to four weeks. Slow, even drying in the shade prevents cracking of the outer skin.
Durability depends on handling at every stage, from planting through maintenance. Bamboo cut at the right time of year but then exposed to ground contact or rain breaks down as quickly as badly harvested material.
Four-foot-long sections of bamboo become a firecracker in Malaysia and Indonesia, called a meriam buluh, or bamboo cannon. Water and calcium carbide go inside, and a stick ignites the resulting acetylene gas for a loud bang. Bamboo also gives the split cane rod that is especially prized for fly fishing.
The Tamil martial art of silambam takes its name from a term meaning hill bamboo. The Indian art of gatka uses bamboo staves for their light weight. Kendo practitioners fight with the bamboo sword called a shinai, and kyūdō archers shoot bamboo bows, called yumi, and arrows. The first gunpowder-based weapons, such as the fire lance, were made of bamboo.
The Chinese langxian, or Wolf Brush Spear, was sometimes a long bamboo pole with a spearhead and layers of leaves still attached. Qi Jiguang's Mandarin Duck Formation used it as a defensive weapon. In the Philippines, bagakay, sharpened bamboo javelins weighted with sand, were thrown in groups at enemy ships or massed formations. Sugob were finely crafted bamboo spears, also weighted with sand, thrown only when they could be retrieved.
The sumpit, a metal-tipped blowgun-spear of hollowed bamboo, was used on islands from the Philippines to Borneo and Sulawesi. Its thick short darts were dipped in the concentrated sap of Antiaris toxicaria, which could cause lethal cardiac arrest. Punji sticks, stakes of sharpened bamboo used in area denial and booby traps, were widely used by the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War.
In Indonesia, the bambu runcing, meaning sharp bamboo or pointed bamboo, is a legendary symbol of revolutionary spirit. Poorly equipped Indonesians used this simple sharpened spear in their fight for independence against Dutch occupation.
In Chinese culture, bamboo, plum blossom, orchid and chrysanthemum are the Four Gentlemen, written méilánzhújú (梅蘭竹菊). They stand for the four seasons and, in Confucian ideology, four aspects of the junzi, the noble one. Pine, bamboo and plum blossom make up the Three Friends of Winter, admired for perseverance under harsh conditions. Japan turned that idea into a ranking. Pine takes first rank, bamboo second and plum third, and the system appears in sushi sets, kimono embroidery and the tiers of rooms at traditional ryōkan inns.
The poet Bai Juyi, who lived from 772 to 846, argued that a gentleman need not be physically strong. He must be mentally strong, upright and perseverant. Like the hollow heart of a bamboo, he should open his heart to anything of benefit and never show arrogance or prejudice. Poets praised bamboo for uprightness, tenacity and modesty, though it is not physically strong, and many poems about bamboo are really about people. Beyond China, bamboo is an Indian symbol of friendship.
Buddhism reached China in the first century. Its canons forbid cruelty to animals, so flesh and eggs were not allowed in the diet, and tender bamboo shoots became a nutritious alternative. A Buddhist monk, Zan Ning, wrote a manual on shoots called Sǔn Pǔ, with descriptions and recipes for many kinds.
The Emperor Yao, in a Chinese legend, tested the future Emperor Shun by giving him two of his daughters as wives. Shun passed by running his household well, and Yao named him successor instead of his own unworthy son. After Shun's death, the tears of his grieving wives fell on the bamboos growing nearby, and that explains spotted bamboo. The women later drowned themselves in the Xiang River and became the goddesses Xiangshuishen.
Several Asian cultures, including that of the Andaman Islands, believe humanity emerged from a bamboo stem. In Philippine mythology, the first man, Malakás, meaning Strong, and the first woman, Maganda, meaning Beautiful, each step out of one half of a split bamboo stem. A Malaysian story has a man who dreams of a beautiful woman under a bamboo plant, then breaks the stem and finds her inside. In Japan's Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, called Taketori Monogatari, the princess Kaguya emerges from a shining bamboo section.
Hawaiian bamboo, called 'ohe, is a kinolau, a body form, of the Polynesian creator god Kāne. The Bozo ethnic group of West Africa take their name from the Bambara phrase bo-so, meaning bamboo house. Bamboo is the national plant of Saint Lucia, and Tanzania possesses a large diversity of species.
Japanese households use bamboo to make New Year's decorations called kadomatsu, as a symbol of prosperity. Bamboo forests sometimes surround Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples as a sacred barrier against evil. Bamboo is the only plant known to have survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima in 1945.
Vietnam treats bamboo as a mark of its national soul. It symbolizes the Vietnamese hometown and virtues such as straightforwardness, hard work, optimism, unity and adaptability. It also symbolizes the spirit of the martial art Vovinam, which joins hard and soft. A Vietnamese proverb says, "Tre già, măng mọc". When the bamboo is old, the bamboo sprouts appear, so the nation will never be annihilated. Traditional villages sit inside thick bamboo hedges called lũy tre. Under the presidency of Ngô Đình Diệm, bamboo was the national symbol of South Vietnam, on its coat of arms, its presidential standard and its đồng coins.
Vietnamese legend also gives bamboo to the hero Thánh Gióng, who grew up at once at the age of three and fought Ân invaders with a bamboo cane. In the tale Cây tre trăm đốt, The Hundred-knot Bamboo Tree, a poor farmer loves a landlord's daughter. The proud landlord demands a bamboo tree of 100 nodes. Gautama Buddha, called Bụt, tells the farmer to join nodes from several trees with the words Khắc nhập, khắc xuất, which mean joined together immediately, fell apart immediately. The landlord touches the bamboo and is stuck to it until he agrees to the marriage.
In North America, river cane of the genus Arundinaria is so central to the material cultures of Southeastern Native American nations that it has been called the plastic of the Southeastern Indians. The Cherokee have used it for waterproof baskets, mats, fishing poles, flutes, blowguns, arrows and houses. Their double-woven baskets of split, dyed river cane are sometimes considered among the finest in the world. Since 98% of the original extent of North American bamboo has been eliminated, the Cherokee have begun an effort to restore it.
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Common questions
How fast does bamboo grow in a day?
Some bamboo species grow 91 cm in 24 hours, which is almost 40 mm an hour. Japanese giant timber bamboo, Phyllostachys bambusoides, has been observed growing 120 cm in a day. A more typical rate for commonly cultivated temperate bamboos is 30-100 mm per day.
How tall can bamboo get?
The giant bamboo Dendrocalamus sinicus has individual stalks that reach 46 m in length, up to 36 cm in diameter and up to 450 kg in weight. The smallest bamboos reach only several inches high at maturity.
Is bamboo a tree or a grass?
Bamboo is a grass, in the subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. It has no secondary growth wood, so its stems stay columnar rather than tapering, and its vascular bundles are scattered through the stalk wall.
Why does bamboo die after it flowers?
After flowering, a bamboo plant declines and often dies entirely. Many species flower only at intervals as long as 65 or 120 years, and the cause of the timing, an apparent cellular alarm clock, is still largely a mystery.
Are raw bamboo shoots poisonous to eat?
Raw or undercooked bamboo shoots contain taxiphyllin, which produces cyanide in the gut. Boiling or steaming for at least 20 minutes with several changes of water renders the shoots harmless.
Where does bamboo grow naturally?
Bamboo grows naturally in Asia from Sakhalin at 50 °N south to northern Australia, in tropical sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar, and in the Americas from southern Argentina to the Andes in Ecuador. Canada and continental Europe have no known native species.
What is the Four Gentlemen in Chinese culture and how does bamboo fit in?
The Four Gentlemen are bamboo, plum blossom, orchid and chrysanthemum, which represent the four seasons and four aspects of the Confucian junzi. Bamboo is admired for uprightness, tenacity and modesty.
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