"tropo" wrote :
"Mark. Gooley" wrote

I understand that it's [B. balcooa] a widespread pest in parts of
Australia, so perhaps people are reluctant to offer it.

I'm in Australia and I haven't heard it referred to as a pest before. It
is, or was the most common large, clumping bamboo on the east coast before
the new era of bamboo plantations. It is a very good durable bamboo
although like many Bambusas, it has a lot of long branches that can get
interlocked making it a little untidy and difficult to manage. I prefer
Gigantochloa & Dendrocalamus species.

I can't seem to find a site calling it a pest, just some mention of how
there
are some out-of-control stands on the east coast of Australia, and how,
yeah, it's not the easiest to harvest because of the tangled branches.
Wonder where I got the idea?

What I'd really like to grow is D. asper, but although that's supposed to
be able to withstand about 23 degrees F (-5 C) without damage to the
culms, I have not been able to get it to survive a winter here (usual
harsh winter: brief lows around 18 F; this rather mild winter we're in
now, lows so far around 25 F). I can get D. asper plants grown from
cuttings; maybe I need to give them winter protection until they get
fairly large. I was hoping that B. balcooa would have enough extra
cold-hardiness to survive here reliably.

(I'm in north Florida, and D. asper seems to do okay in the southernmost
parts of Florida, as in the Miami area [and surely the Keys, if anyone has
tried it there]. Maybe it's just plain too cold here for the tropical
clumpers,
and I'm stuck with B. oldhamii or the like.)

Mark.