Bamboos for hedging
 

Hello

I am considering planting a row of bamboo hedging along the inside of a 45m garden perimeter to provide a pleasant yet thick screen above the 6 foot timber fences and enable me to plant strawberry bushes and flowering plants in the ground to give foiliage and make use of the emptiness around the canes. A friend suggested Yushania Anceps would make a good screen. Does anyone have experience of this type of Bamboo for hedging?

Looking at some of the websites these are sold in 5, 10, 20 litres containers – how much screening would a 20 litre container produce and therefore what quantities do you think I would need for my 45metre perimeter? and what kind of prices should I be loooking to pay?

I live in greater Manchester post code OL11. Are there any local suppliers anyone can recommend i the North West?

Thanks

Mohammed Maherban

With many good bamboo plants typically costing in the range £20 to £30 for a fairly minimum sized container, this could end up being very expensive if you need a dense planting. Now a 20l container, if vigorous, might possibly be capable of being divided into about 3 plants, but you need to make sure it is one of those bamboos that propagates easily that way - it would be ruination to divide something that really doesn't like it. And remember that division will set you back a couple of years in terms of the maturity of the plant you put in the ground. But when I wanted a short hedge (about 1.5m), I bought a 20l container of (a slowly spreading) bamboo, split it into 3 plants, and it worked well. Planted at about 60cm intervals, the hedge is now more or less continuous after a few years. Clearly with a more rampant bamboo, the initial planting can be at much wider intervals.

An advantage of Yushania is that, once established, it is really rather invasive. Each plant will therefore over time spread to fill much larger gaps between plants than with "better behaved" bamboos. My experience of a friend who has one growing into his garden from next door is that it provides dense cover. But you need to contain it between underground barriers to ensure that it spreads along the hedge, and not perpendicular to it. Semiarundinaria fastuosa is also commonly recommended for hedging, because when it spreads it tends to spread in a long line. A long rhizome extends out underground in a straight line, and you get a line of new culms along it, and then a new clump building around each new culm. Provided you encourage it to go along the hedge line, again by sensible containment, and possibly even locating an extending rhizome and encouraging its direction, one plant could over a few years give you a hedge 5 or 10 m long. But realise that your mature hedge is several years away.

http://www.uk-bamboos.co.uk/default.htm in Matlock, Derbyshire, is one of Britain's top handful of bamboo specialists. You could give them a call. These people are a major specialist bamboo nursery in Shropshire, and have a good mail-order service. http://www.junglegiants.co.uk/index.html Again I think you'll get good advice if you give them a call. Neither of them is set up to entertain randomly passing visitors.

Be aware that bamboo is a very hungry and thirsty plant, so any plants you grow among the canes will have to fight for their food and drink. But of course some plants can be grown in that way. But I'm not sure you'll get a very good crop of strawberries by planting them there. They'd be better off the other side of your rhizome barrier.

It's definitely worth having a good look round and price-check - I've seen similarly sized bamboos at half or even a third of the price of other ones. Also, have you thought of trying Freecycle or your local horticultural club? Most people with bamboo will have chunks to give away every year.