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How Bamboo Can Invade Your House

By Rain Noe - August 14

in Environmental

You might see the image below and think "Gosh, wouldn't it be pretty to have a little bamboo in my garden."

That can be a mistake. Bamboo comes in two varieties, "clumping" and "running." The latter variant shoots out runners, or rhizomes, horizontally—for decades. They can spread far enough to reach from your garden to beneath your house, or over into a neighbor's property. These rhizomes then develop nodes, from which vertical shoots grow. These shoots can punch through asphalt, displace paving stones, and bust through plaster walls in their quest for light.

It's not just Japan that has the problem. As The Guardian reports, it was trendy in the '90s and 2000s for British home improvement TV shows to incorporate bamboo plantings. Here in the 2020s, startled homeowners are finding that a neighbor's project from decades ago has now spread onto their property.

The only way to eradicate the infestation, is to pull up the floor, then hunt down and pull out every last root ball and rhizome. Outside the house, this can be done with a digger, as shown here by Environet UK, a company that specializes in invasive plant removal.

Inside the house, however, the work must be done manually. The worst case of domestic damage they'd ever had to deal with cost "more than £100,000" (USD $128,343) to fix!

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George Mokray

4 months ago

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I attended a design seminar at RISD with writer Bruce Sterling years ago. One of the ideas students were working with was bamboo. They made sure to plant the bamboo, however, in ways that they couldn't spread, for instance by planting only inside buried tires.

Bamboo is great and very versatile but, like everything else, you gotta be careful.

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Martin Rosenblum

4 months ago

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An interesting program about bamboo on NHK.
Link: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2015278/
There is a 120 year blooming cycle for a certain type of bamboo.

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Dee An

4 months ago

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90s and 2000s British home improvement TV shows have a lot to answer for. They also populated covered radiators (?!), and setting halogen GU10 lamps in recessed holes in ceilings - a situation that didn't provide them with the cooling they were design for, so they failed regularly.

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