Sacred bamboo is Nandina domestica (not actually a bamboo) and
has very
large compound leaves with long internodes and rarely makes a
good
bonsai. It is usually grown as a large accent. They do respond
quite
well to chopping back hard with new shoots low down and even
suckers
from underground.

I gave up on mine and planted them in my Japanese garden where
they are
a classic plant. They flower nicely now with small, pale cream
flowers
followed by red berries and give all year round interest.

Lucky Bamboo (also not really a Bamboo) is common in UK garden
centres
at the moment and may have been mislabelled as Sacred. Its fat
succulent
stems are often wound into spirals, woven into weird lattices
or planted
as lots of short cuttings in a growing gel. I think they are
all awful.


There are hundreds of Nandina cultivars, some with leaves as
small as 1/4 inch and which make very nice bonsai -- I even have
an 8-inch mame Nandina. They have marvelous fall color -- and
the leaves stay on the tree (in full color) all winter and even
into the spring.

Nandina domestica is more commonly called "Heavenly bamboo" in
+my_ neck of the wood.

And then, of course, there is the so-called "lucky bamboo" which
I bet some entrepreneurial seller has undoubtedly tied the name
"sacred" to in hope of even more sales. This plant is even
farther from the bamboos. It is, actually, a member of a fairly
common tropical house plant genus, Dracena, and will grow
anywhere in whatever light you give it. (It's also ugly as sin in
most of the plants I have seen for sale.) It has no bonsai
potential (that _I_ can imagine, at least, though Kevin felt the
same for Nandina).

Jim Lewis - - Tallahassee, FL - The phrase
'sustainable growth' is an oxymoron. - Stephen Viederman

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