Why Does Bamboo Spread So Quickly?

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Bamboo is a grass. Not a woody plant, not a shrub — a grass, and one that has evolved to colonise ground quickly and hold it.

What you can see above ground are canes, properly called culms. They come up, they reach full height in a single season, and then they stop. A cane does not get taller in its second year. The plant does not grow by making its canes bigger; it grows by making more of them, somewhere else.

The Part That Does the Travelling

Underneath, running bamboo puts out horizontal stems called rhizomes. These are not roots. They are stems that happen to grow sideways through the soil, usually in the top 20 to 40 centimetres, carrying buds along their length.

A rhizome extends through the ground during the growing season, and at intervals a bud turns upward and becomes a new cane. The result is a plant whose visible parts keep appearing further and further from where anybody planted anything.

How Fast, in Practice

• A metre a year is unremarkable for an established running bamboo in decent soil
• Three to five metres a year happens on open, loose, well-watered ground with nothing in the way
• Faster in a wet season, and considerably slower on heavy clay, stony ground or anywhere dry
• Faster along the easy route. Rhizomes take the line of least resistance — along a fence line, under a path, beside a drain run, into the loose soil of a border

Ten years of that from a single clump planted in a corner is genuinely capable of reaching every boundary of an average garden, which is why people are so often astonished by the extent once it is traced out.

Why Nobody Notices Until It Is Large

This is the part that makes bamboo particular. The spread happens underground and invisibly for a season or two before a cane appears at the new location. By the time you see a cane three metres from the clump, the rhizome that produced it has already been there for a while, and has very likely gone further still.

Why It Gets Through Things

Rhizomes and emerging canes are surprisingly strong, and their growing tips are hard and pointed. Bamboo is regularly found coming up through gravel, through the joints in paving, alongside and occasionally through thin tarmac, under decking, and beneath a shed to emerge on the other side.

It does not bore through sound concrete or dig under deep foundations, and claims that it does are overstated. What it does is find every gap, and gardens have a great many gaps.

The Practical Consequence

All of this leads to one conclusion, and it is the reason bamboo removal is quoted as its own service rather than as part of general clearance: dealing with bamboo means dealing with the rhizome network, and that is excavation over an area, not cutting at a point.

Clumping bamboos, which spread only a few centimetres a year from a tight base, are an entirely different proposition — and establishing which one you have is the first thing worth doing.

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If bamboo has appeared somewhere you did not plant it, send a photograph of the furthest cane you can find — that marks the edge we need to work to.