Garden Designers & Landscape Gardeners
Garden Buildings in South & East England

Semiarundinaria fastuosa

This is a special bamboo. It has a quality that makes it unique in the huge range of bamboo that we can grow in the UK; it does not arch, each culm stays upright throughout its life and in most situations this is a clump forming bamboo, although it will grow in straight lines. This is invaluable if you have resticted space where a bamboo with lax leaning culms and spreading shoots would take over. It achieves this feat of compactness by having only short side branches which limits the amount of leaf that can grow on each culm, thereby reducing the weight on each culm allowing it to stay upright.

This characteristic also makes for an attractive appearance with the leaves making compact clump like groups in the shape of tiers vertically spaced at intervals on the culm. This is how many classical Japanese paintings depict bamboo, an effect usually achieved by pruning where the side branches are shortened. This beautiful species has many different varieties but the whole genus has a distinctive appearance, providing a welcome contrast to the more common Phyllostachys species which are much more common in the UK bamboo market.