Bamboo garden
When I first decided to make a bamboo garden, I thought it would be easy. You see, I have had lucky bamboo plants for years. I knew how easily bamboo grew. I figured that bamboo gardening would be a snap. You just let it grow and grow, and that is it. I was pretty ambitious. I even thought that I could use the plants that I grew in my garden to make bamboo floors for my house. I did not realize what I was up against.
You see, I was right and I was wrong. In some ways, bamboo gardens are very easy. Growing plants for a bamboo garden is quite simple. Bamboo grows like wildfire. You can not stop it from growing! That, however, is the problem. A proper bamboo garden is not the same as a stand of wild bamboo. To get a bamboo garden to look like something is actually a pretty difficult trick. You see the bamboo nurseries with their carefully crafted stands of bamboo, and you think it is easy. It is not! It requires a lot of work. Not only does bamboo grow quickly, but it is extremely tough.
The secret to bamboo gardening is to work at it every day or two. A bamboo garden is something that becomes exponentially more difficult the less frequently you tend to it. If you can pull out unwanted bamboo saplings when they are young, carefully shape the bamboo stems that you have as they grow, and be involved with every stage of planning your garden, it will not really take that much time. I would say that a moderately sized bamboo garden can take as little as 10 to 20 minutes a day on average. You have to stick with it, however, or else it can become overwhelming very quickly. The bamboo garden will become nothing but an overgrown stand the bamboo. It happened to me, and it can happen to you. The bamboo will starve out everything else in the garden!
One of the most important things to consider when you are planning bamboo gardens is what other plants to use and where to place them. The bamboo garden, after all, is not primarily about the bamboo. The bamboo is just a backdrop. It is about the few, sparse, other flowers you place around the garden. Each of these flowers must be a work of art in and of itself.
