echinosum wrote:
Mysterious Traveler;884862 Wrote:
I have never heard that about more than one type together causing
stress and making them go to seed, but I have only been growing
bamboo since last July.

From what I heard bamboo all over the world can go to seed and
die around the same time every forty eight to fifty years and
I hope it's not time for it to do that again.
Some, not all, species of bamboo display gregarious flowering. Others
flower sporadically, but still at long intervals. A gregarious
flowering can spread over several years, for example in the case of the
recent gregarious flowering of Fargesia nitida, it didn't apply to all
cultivars and has stretched over at least 5 years. The flowering
interval of bamboos varies from species to species, and some types of
bamboo have never been observed to flower even though we have had them
under observation for over 100 years in some such cases. The "48-50"
number you quote probably applies to that specific species in NE India
that results in rodent plagues, and I would tend to suspect the number
is spuriously precise: we probably only have a handful of observations.
For the types generally in cultivation in cooler countries, my guess is
that 50 years would be on the low side.

Stress can result in flowering of specific bamboo plants, or parts of
specific plants, but this does not trigger a gregarious flowering.
Merely being in the same garden as other bamboo does not result in
stress, otherwise the botanical collections would be stuffed. But I can
imagine growing bamboos very close to each other so they compete for
water and nutrients could be stressful.


Been playing with bamboo about 20 years at one point had over 100
species of bamboo here, now down to about 60 some odd types.
Many years ago when I actually cared about bamboo I followed up on some
people that in the past had collections of bamboo on small properties
and there multiple species collection had been reduced to a few types.

Has any one seen a bamboo tissue culture plant every reach the size
listed in a species guide?