Bamboo hedge

Bamboo forms a beautiful hedge or windbreak and gives your garden an exotic feeling! These days you can choose soft, contoured, thick hedges or open, high windbreaks. Bamboe is relatively maintenance free, is hardy and evergreen. So the exotic feeling lasts all year! It's dynamic, blows in the wind and makes a relaxing rustling sound. There are numerous leaf and culm (stem) colours. A hedge will grow quickly and give you privacy. As cats have difficulty in penetrating a thick bamboo hedge birds readily make their nests in them. Some types of bamboo will produce so called 'tonkin' sticks; pieces of wood with which you can make or build something, and some young shoots are edible! A bamboo hedge or windbreak suits traditional and oriental gardens.

Docile bamboe or a high, spreading plant? 

Even spreading bamboos can be contained these days!

In recent years interest in the application of bamboo has increased dramatically. In the past, bamboo had the reputation of being a bit of a thug, whose roots could race through the garden. These days we are more enlightened; there are docile bamboos (such as Fargesias) whose roots stay put. And for the adventurous gardener who wants a bit of oriental jungle there is root barrier to contain root growth. Here you can work out what's best for you:

Planting bamboo

You can set out to make a neat, manicured hedge or a wild, natural one. It can be very low (20cm) to a 5m giant, sparsely foliated or a dense evergreen wildlife paradise. The higher and thicker the hedge, the closer the plants should be planted and the larger they should be. For a high windbreak plants should be planted 50-150cm apart; more is not necessary as the room between the plants will be filled within years. For a dense thicket plants should be 50cm or less apart unless you have 3 years or more to let the plants fill the intervening room.

A shorter distance between plants is required when planting out a low bamboo hedge. To cultivate a thick Fargesia hedge, the planting distance is dependant upon the time in which the hedge is required to be a 'thick hedge'. Fargesia extends it's roots to a maximum of 10cm per year (not including the year of planting).

Compared to well rooted, potted plants shoots dug from the garden require an extra year to produce a mature hedge.

Rhizome planting

Sometimes rhizomes (roots) rather than plants are avialalbe. Rhizomes can produce a fine hedge (but don't try this with docile bamboos!) It's best to use year-old rhizomes, recognisable by the presence of scales spread between the nodes of the root. Choose a rhizome with around 6 nodes (root joints) in march or april and plant them around 25cm deep. Be aware that part of the rhizome can fail. If you plant the rhizome vertically then it will initially produce shoots, but if you plant horizontally the plant will first produce more rhizomes. Try and plant the rhizomes in the direction of the hedge. It's also possible to start the rhizome off in the winter in a warm place such as in your lounge in a long planting tray. As soon as the weather becomes mild and moist, the rhizome can then be planted out. Allow these propagated plants plenty of time to get used to the climate outside and protect from sun and wind in the first weeks.

Important: planting from rhizomes is only possible with tall/spreading bamboo types and is not suited to Fargesias!