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Old 16-03-2004, 12:40 AM
Mark. Gooley
 
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Default Moso diameters (was Moso sending up shoots)


"plantsman" wrote:
BTW where is the other grove in Anderson? When we first
tried to find the above mentioned grove, we found very few
local people that had any idea of what we were talking
about. I live in northeast TN (Zone 6a) and would
love to try 'Moso' but scared of losing my investment
over the winter on this pricey plant. P. vivax does well here.


I meant that the cemetery has two groves, one near its main
entrance and one of its edges (and that ravine or gully or
whatever you wanna call it), the other along a creek; it's
the latter that gets tended, but frankly the thickest culms I
saw on my visit are the ones in the untended grove. Heck,
for all I know it has three...I didn't explore the whole place.

The locals 1) often don't know where the cemetery is and
2) don't know that their town is nationally famous among
bamboo fanciers for that moso. In fact, I lost my copy of
the directions to the old cemetery and went to the library
in Anderson, where most of the librarians didn't know
where the cemetery is (one old-timer knew exactly
where I meant and gave good directions). The clean-up
is usually on a weekend sometime around this time of
year, and participants are allowed to dig and take home
some of the moso.

Adam Turtle (I think that's his name) was there, as I'm told
he usually is for the clean-up; he runs a bamboo nursery in
Tennessee I think, and offers the Anderson clone, which he
claims is more cold-hardy than most moso. He told me that
moso is an oddball among bamboo in that it stores most of
its starch (and hence reserves of food for putting out new
shoots) in its culms rather than its rhizomes. This adds a
potential difficulty to transplanting it: if you damage the
connection between culm and rhizome by rough handling,
the culm may survive for a few years but there may never
be any new shoots. I managed to kill the plant I dug at
Anderson, and have only the seedling I'd bought the year
before from a seller near me in Florida.

Lots of on-line bamboo sellers have (or used to have, a
few years ago) moso seedlings at not too high a cost.
If you're willing to wait a few years for one to get large,
that might be the cheapest way.

Time to go plant the Dendrocalamus asper I bought the
other week in south Florida. The new shoot has already
been damaged by last week's near-freezes, and I fear that
I will lose that plant over the coming winter, but I'm damned
well going to give it the old college try. The literature
claims that D. asper can take 23F without damage to mature
culms, and this last winter it barely got that cold here...I
might just get lucky. Also got the slightly-more-cold-hardy
B. dissemulator (or is it B. dissimulator?) and B. chungii,
which I've just planted. I don't see myself getting big fat
culms out of ANYTHING here, mind you: the moso probably
won't go over 4 inches, and the D. asper will probably either
die or get frozen to the roots annually...

Mark., "But the big bamboo pleases one and all!"