21 September 2010

pandas eat bamboo ?

i am guessing that some pandas eat beyond just bamboo in their diets, but that old snickers commercial (would you like to eat lunch with me ?) and its dialogue still rings through my ears once in a while.

fortunately, while many known bamboo types are invasive and incredibly difficult to uproot from soil once the thick, white, and wiry tendrils have made friends with the ground-- there are some domesticated ornamental varieties which are safe and beautiful for home landscapes.

dwarf heavenly bamboo, or nandina domestica, comes in several tiny-sized varieties. this one below is fire power. i love its papery feel.


i don't know the exact name of this one, but it's one of the taller varieties that stays narrow, non-invasive, and gets maybe about six to eight feet tall. like most bamboo, it is semi-evergreen. they're all mostly green throughout the year but are churning out their fall color.


and then not far behind the barn is one of the in fact invasive types, sprouting shoots like madly mentored stalks.





in the woods way back behind the garden center, bamboo reaching probably twenty feet or more in the air is what i used to call bamboo jail, when my cousin laura and i discovered it. i wish i had photographs of it, but traveling back there is jungle-like.

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