I visited two botanical gardens last month, and perhaps the best specimens in both (at least to me!) were the bamboos. The first botanical garden was the Harry P. Leu Botanical Garden in Orlando, FL, which I have visited several times before. The second botanical garden I visited was the Kampong: A National Tropical Botanical Garden in Miami, FL. I have only visited this second garden once before, and that was perhaps more than a decade ago.
In both places, I just had to gaze in wonder at the amazing bamboo specimens that were planted all over the area. Both had sections dedicated to the subfamily, but both also had members scattered throughout the grounds, their amazing trunks reaching far up into the canopy. The Harry P. Leu in particular had groves of the massive Bambusa vulgaris as anchor points in the garden, while the Kampong had some specimens that were on the more unusual side, such as Gigantochloa pseudoarundinacea and its massive beautiful leaves.
The only negative I saw were the graffiti that people had carved into the stems of many of the bamboos, in defiance of the many notices not to do so. Their insipid texts marred the otherwise beautiful surfaces of the culms. Fortunately, bamboos are still grasses, and each culm may last only 5-10 years, perhaps less, thus denying these blockheads the immortality in words that they may have craved.
After my visits, I decided to learn more about the bamboos, because in many ways, the tree-like bamboos (there are some members of the subfamily Bambusoideae that are herbaceous) are some of the most interesting grasses of all.
So, here are a few things that I’ve learned (including citations to authoritative sources) about the only grasses that have some claim to the moniker “trees”:
1. Bamboos are likely the fastest growing plants in the world. In the right conditions, some species can grow up to 1 meter every 24 hours! 1
2. A grove of bamboos can provide up to 35% more oxygen than an equivalent area of trees, due mainly to their very fast growth rates! 2
3. By weight, bamboo is five times stronger than concrete. It is also lighter than steel, but has the same strength-to-weight ratio as it in tension. It has been called “vegetal steel” because of this, and so is heavily used in the construction industry, especially in East Asia.3
4. Bamboos were instrumental in the invention of firecrackers in China. In one story, scarcity of fuel in a village made the villagers harvest bamboo stalks and try to burn them. Due to the large amounts of compressed air in bamboo culms, the heat caused the air to expand rapidly and resulted in explosions. 4
5. Bamboo was instrumental in the production of the first practical light bulb. Thomas Edison and his team of workers tried out thousands of filaments made from different materials until one made from bamboo lasted 1200 hours! 5
6. Bamboos are very economically important. The global commercial bamboo market size was estimated at USD 67.13 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 88.44 billion by 2030. This growth will be mainly driven by infrastructure investments and the growing need for economically sustainable bamboo products.6
7. Many bamboos exhibit mass flowering, where entire forests of bamboo flower over the course of a few years, then die. The time to flowering (and seeding) can be extremely long, with the record currently being for the species Phyllostachys bambusoides, which takes 120 years to flower, then die 7. This flowering of a single genet takes place across all the individual members, even if cut and regrown pieces have been taken somewhere completely far away. The mechanism behind this is still unknown.
8. Bamboo growth is completely different than those of trees. The shoot when it comes out of the ground has about the same diameter as the culm when it reaches its mature height. It’s almost like a periscope that rises from the earth, and the shoot reaches its mature height very quickly, within just one season 8.
9. Bamboos have manipulated pandas via the use of miRNAs or micro-RNAs. These plant-derived materials circulate in the bloodstream of pandas and might be actively influencing the food preferences of the pandas, making bamboos more attractive to the animals. It might even help the pandas extract more calories from bamboo, which is nutritionally poor! 9
10. Some aggressive bamboo species in forests can physically damage (and ultimately kill) the trees around them and carve out large areas where they become the dominant species. This is wildly different than the usual method of grasses, which involves the use of external disturbance factors such as natural (and artificial) fires to aid in their rise to dominance 10.
These are only a few of the things that I have found out about bamboos after my time marveling at them in the Harry P. Leu and Kampong botanical gardens. So the next time you see one of the non-herbaceous bamboos, take a moment to reflect on the many interesting and unusual features of this most tree-like of the grasses. I hope to add to the list above as time passes and I discover even more incredible things about the Bambusoideae.
LIterature Cited
1. Things you should know about bamboo. Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
2. Yuji Isagi, ‘Carbon Stock and Cycling in a Bamboo Phyllostachys bambusoides Stand’, Ecological-Research, IX/I (1994), p. 42.
3. Marcelo Villegas, New Bamboo: Architecture and Design (Bogotá, 2003), p. 44; Liese, The Anatomy of Bamboo Culms, pp. 161–5.
4. Exploding Bamboo: The Origins of the Firecracker
5. The History of the Light Bulb
6. Grandview Market Analysis Report: Bamboos Market (2025 – 2030)
7. Janzen DH (1976). Why Bamboos Wait so Long to Flower. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics Vol. 7, pp. 347-391 (45 pages)
8. Lucas, S. (2013). Bamboo. Reaktion Books.
9. How Bamboos Exploited Pandas, Sejarah Poaceae.
10. Bamboos Red in Tooth and Claw, Sejarah Poaceae.
Leave a Reply