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Michael Byrne, a resident of Stratford Hills in southwest Richmond, has been battling a bamboo grove in his backyard since 1996.
“My house backs up to Rattlesnake Creek, which is basically 30 acres of undeveloped wetland,” Byrne says. “You walk through there, and it’s so thick with bamboo you can’t see 3 feet away. It’s like being in southeast Asia.”
Bamboo native to Asia was first introduced to the United States in 1882 as an ornamental plant and quickly spread throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. For 30 years, Byrne and his neighbors have fought what he calls a “losing battle” with the invasive species.
“It can grow through concrete, through asphalt. During growing season, you can measure it by the hour. And to get rid of it, you have to get big equipment and dig down 2 feet,” he says. “If you cut down the stalks, it’s like the movie ‘Alien’ — it just gets stronger.”
Then in mid-March, something unexpected happened: The bamboo in his backyard began to turn brown and die. “I thought it was because of the drought or because we had a really cold winter,” he says.
The real reason is part of a deeper trend in the life cycle of bamboo stands across the state.
The species of bamboo that has bedded down in Virginia is Phyllostachys aurea, or “fishpole bamboo,” which flowers roughly every 35 years. When the bamboo stalks flower, all of the plant’s energy goes into producing that flower; its leaves drop, no new leaves form and the mother plant usually dies.
John Hayden, a biology professor at the University of Richmond, says that the process often occurs simultaneously in a geographic region. “The idea is that by flowering all at once — using decades’ worth of stored food reserves and flowering in a massive and coordinated way — there is no possibility that birds and small mammals could possibly consume, completely, the tremendous number of seeds produced,” Hayden explains.
“Predators eat all the seeds they can,” he says, “but there are always seeds left unconsumed that then have the opportunity to germinate and start a new colony.”
Hayden says it is difficult to know for sure whether the new seeds will be successful — or even whether the mother plants will die, although it is likely.
“There is a clump on Route 60 in Powhatan that I drive past rather frequently that flowered two years ago. That clump is mostly dead,” he says. “But there are a few short, green shoots at the periphery of the clump — so perhaps some small fraction of that clump will persist.”
To be absolutely certain that bamboo is eliminated, Hayden says, wait until the end of the flowering season to cut down the stalks. This ensures that the plant’s food resources have been fully spent.
Bamboo’s dense underground root system — the plant’s rhizome stems and roots grow laterally — should be greatly weakened at the end of the flowering season, Hayden adds. If there are any signs of life, the rhizomes should be destroyed, too.
For Byrne, the sudden flowering of his bamboo means a surprise victory in a territorial war he has been slowly losing for decades. “I’m ecstatic,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with an acre of dead bamboo. It’s a problem I never thought I would have.”
