I want to tell you about the afternoon I decided to dig out bamboo roots by hand using nothing but a standard garden trowel, a misplaced sense of confidence, and apparently zero understanding of what bamboo roots actually look like underground. Spoiler: the trowel snapped in half. My pride did not survive either. What I … Read more
I still remember the morning I walked into my spare bedroom and noticed a thin green shoot poking up through a crack in the baseboard. At first I thought it was a weed that had somehow snuck in. Then it hit me — bamboo growing into house, my house, through the foundation wall. My stomach … Read more
I still remember the sound — a low, muffled crack coming from the back patio on a Tuesday morning in late April. I thought maybe a branch had fallen overnight. What I found instead was a two-inch fissure splitting my concrete patio nearly in half, and a tangle of pale bamboo rhizomes snaking right through … Read more
The day I realized my bamboo had eaten my neighbor’s flower bed was the day I knew things had gotten serious. What started as a charming little privacy screen along my back fence had quietly — sneakily — spread six feet into Linda’s yard, strangling her hostas and creeping under her garden shed. She knocked … Read more