Bamboo Info

We recently donated a variety of plants to Alta Vista Gardens, in Vista CA, to help them start their new Bamboo Forest!

Here is a List of the plants that we donated:

We just planted them and they all look Beautiful!!

For those of you who do get the chance to visit our nursery you will be amazed at all the new bamboo companions we've gathered together this year. We're now offering a full array of exotic flora from all over the world, most notably Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. We're really showing them off, as you can see from how different our front entrance now looks! We hope some of you will find the time in your travels to visit us.

We installed an entire new demonstration garden dedicated to running bamboos. The site has 14 beds, each planted with different species and surrounded with rhizome barrier. This running bamboo garden will be used to illustrate the ease of installing the barrier while adding to our already awesome collection of mature in ground specimens. As most of you bamboo lovers have learned, there's a BIG difference between looking at pictures of mature bamboo and seeing, hearing and feeling the real deal! Please stop in for a personal tour if you are in the area.

We recently received two great sets of photos from our website visitors! The first set is from Mac T., who is building a "Bamboo City" in San Pablo - Laguna Philippines a must pit stop for travelers.

Here's a beautiful grove of Phyllostachys vivax that started from five transplants in 2001. Some of this year's culms in the mature grove were 33+ feet. The grove is just east of Kingsburg, CA.

We had a kind customer from Ventura County, CA show us the progress of their Phyllostachys nigra:

We would love to see how your bamboo garden is doing! Send us email through our Contact Form and we will send you an address to send back your bamboo photos. Every so often we have gardening contests, so stay tuned!

Squidoo is a hand-built collection of half a million informational webpages built and ranked by people using the web. "That's Bamboo? Wow!", the #4 ranked webpage for News on Squidoo, features the picture of Macy that we posted a few weeks ago:

Thanks to the creator of this Squidoo page for posting this picture and creating a wonderful compilation of bamboo information!

The Gianettos (one of our Bamboo Garden Contest Winners!) were kind enough to send us photos of their first shoots of spring! This is also a great example of the effectiveness of rhizome barrier in controlling the spread of running bamboos.

These shoots will be roughly double the size of the current plant, creating a nice thick screen by the end of summer

Shoots coming up at the edge of the rhizome barrier.

Did you know that the shoots of most bamboos are edible? Some are tastier than others and thus more widely cultivated for culinary use. Apparently our nursery mascot, Macy, recognizes that Phyllostachys bissetii is one of the first species of the genus to shoot in spring and he definitely finds them to his liking! The cultivar pictured is the dwarf form of P. bissetii which is smaller and even hardier (-15F/-26C) than the species, staying under 18' (5.5m). The overall look is a deep forest green color with culms that contrast in lime green to yellow. Both the specie and the dwarf make striking potted specimens!

As you can see, this is the perfect time of year to start planting bamboo! Order online or give us a call toll free at (866) 293-2925.

We know that a picture is worth 1000 words, so we try our best to keep our photo library up to date. If you have a great photo of a particular bamboo, be sure to use our Contact Form to get with us, we will send you an email address where you can send the images. We'd be happy to post it on our website!

We would like to thank everyone who checked in on us via email and phone to be sure we and our properties were safe. The fires went to the north and south of us. We were mostly covered with smoke and ash. Our manager Ron was evacuated along with his wife, two black Labradors, a turtle, and tree frogs. They stayed in our house and moved back after 6 days and fortunately only found a sooty ashy mess to clean up. Our main loss was to bamboo plants that we could not water at our propagation greenhouse for 4 days. Most of it will recover by next summer. We were lucky. Our hearts are with those who were not so lucky.

Ralph Evans, Owner