AT THE GENTLE MERCY OF PLANTS -- ESSAYS AND POEMS

Bamboo: An Honest Love Affair

IT WAS BACK in the nineteen-twenties that I first became acquainted with bamboo. I like to think now that it was some sensitivity on my part as a young person that responded to the unexpected discovery of this Oriental plant in my mother's recently acquired garden in southern California. My family had bought an old place in the foothill suburbs above Pasadena, and among the company of trees, shrubs and perennials we now owned was a solitary bamboo that first took me by surprise and then absorbed me by its unfamiliarity. But was it only that it was unfamiliar? The truth is that some quite potent reason has given to this member of the grass family a strong emotional influence over plant lovers. It is not easy to define. What is it?

The bamboos do not often charm us with flowers, nor do we normally rely on them for substantial food, although a bamboo laden with delicate, tremulous and pendant bloom is an angelic, shimmering sight, and the addition of bamboo sprouts to our western menus has given a fashionable look to dinner while not competing with mashed potatoes for satisfaction of American appetite. No, neither flower nor fruit can answer the question that one asks. Still, if it is not answered it becomes obsessive.

Why does bamboo fascinate us? One way to discover the answer is to stand in a grove, or even a single clump, of a giant species, and look up to the tops of the towering culms. They are straight and tall and parallel. They may rise forty feet and more above us. They resemble, in a sleek and eerie way, the pillars and colonnades of temples. In the midst of these living pillars there is a presence, an excitement. Is it nature? Is it art? Is it, we ask, a touch of terror? With each question we come a little closer to the answer. It is to a special kind of majesty that we have addressed our questions. Up there and just visible is the meaning we hunt for. The human mind has been stirred by an ancient mystery. Between us and the bamboo there is an affinity. What more can we be sure of, or ask?

The taxonomy and nomenclature of this tribe are challenges to an able scientist. I am not even remotely of that elevated class. My familiarity with bamboo is simply an honest love affair, and if it is not requited, that's my own business. Bamboo has been a captivating partner of my life. The time has come to offer recognition to the plant which-- I could easily say the plant who -- in many forms, great or dwarf, has meant so much to me. This essay is a personal tribute of devotion. Such is its wistful and affectionate intention.

First of all, back there in the old garden, imagine a young woman of eager but uncultivated botanical instincts trying to find out who had brought this bamboo to the southern California suburbs. I was correct in presuming that it was no ordinary kind. It had a dark green stem or culm stained with blotches of another color. It also had style and elegance. My curiosity led me to many futile enquiries in the neighborhood, but I finally learned that my mother's garden, then about fifty years old, was planted by a woman who had travelled admiringly in the Orient. Had she eagerly and illegally smuggled into this country a rhizome of the bamboo in the sleeve of an embroidered kimono? Impossible to say. Then eventually I learned that a man who had worked for the Los Angeles County Park Department had once lived here, and might have added some plants to the garden. Was he the one? At that, my efforts at discovery of provenance and person came to a blank halt. In the meantime a good many years had passed, while the bamboo had grown into a tall, rich, graceful clump. Flourishing in the half-shade between two great cypresses it was enchanting. It bent and swung and arched. It spread its heavy plumes when the wind shook it.

At this point Dr. Russell Seibert, Director of the Los Angeles County Arboretum heard of it through my husband, Frederick Monhoff, who as an architect for County design and building was then working at the Arboretum in Arcadia, and Dr. Seibert came to our old garden, viewed the bamboo and declared it to be one of the most beautiful he had seen -- and he was a specialist in bamboo. In my search for identity I had at least acquired pride. Finally, Russell Seibert brought Dr. John Creech, in charge of U.S. Plant Introduction Garden, Glenn Dale, Maryland to observe my bamboo, an innocent plant attracting the official interest of the Government. Dr. Creech walked around it with a motion picture camera and took its circular portrait. He announced that it was Phyllostachys nigra variety henonis forma boryana. Here in a long name ended a long search. This bamboo originated in China. How it came to southern California was never decided.

That is all very real to me today although it happened so long ago. I am grateful that I can associate my first ardent feeling for bamboo with my youth, with the time of beginnings and the early years of hope, love and creativity. It was, however, a rare and lonely attachment, shared by no one close to me at that moment and catered to by no local nurseries. With the exception of Lord Redesdale's "The Bamboo Garden," out of print, hard to find and very expensive, the few books that might turn up were inhumanly technical. Two decades passed before the USA Department of Agriculture published the series of fine informative pamphlets by Robert A. Young which became the bible of the increasing numbers of bamboo fanciers. From these publications I learned of the Barbour Lathrop U.S. Experimental Bamboo Gardens near Savannah, Georgia. In 1950 returning from a summer trip to France I took a circuitous route home to the west coast by driving down the east coast to visit the Savannah Gardens. I arrived on Saturday and found the place closed and locked. This was a stunning blow, as I could not delay until a later day. But I could just barely get in, and did, by climbing dangerously over the gate. Once inside I wandered in humid bliss in the company of the florious ornamentals growing there. When, shakily, I climbed out over the Government's inhospitable gate I had forty U.S.A. deep south mosquito bites on one bare arm. I was too startled to add up the bites on the other arm.

Nothing I saw at the Gardens, however grand, stole my admiration from my own bamboo at home, for the wealth of its plumes surpassed the foliage even in hot, damp Georgia. This should have set me pondering on the relation between soil and foliage. The result is not obtained merely by love and fertilizer. In my case it had been good luck, or let's say, the bamboo's good luck to have been planted in soil of the ages that had not been weakened or polluted by its suburban use.

I recollected standing on the deck of my home above the old garden and looking into the extraordinary display of the bory bamboo, its wild movement in the wind or its mystical serenity on a quiet day. "If you should ever bloom," I said, "and die from blooming, as they say may happen to bamboos, it would be terribly sad." Then after a moment I said, "But it would make it easier to leave this place, if we ever decide to leave." Eventually, after thirty-six years of living of one home and garden we did decide to leave, taking with us much of the bamboo. It had never bloomed, or if it did ever bloom it was before we were acquainted with it, and the event was not fatal. In past years I had started bory in another corner of the old garden. There it created a handsome clump. I decided to take it whole, if I could, and as it was far too heavy for me to handle, I hired the Green Brothers. The Green Brothers were large black men who would dig your garden up and move it elsewhere, if you wished. At work on my bamboo, one of them asked, "Ma' am, why don't you'all sell some of this pretty stuff?" "Sell it!" I cried, "If I had a daughter, would I sell her?" The Green Brothers thought me very amusing.

Today I live in the Napa Valley of northern California. Here I have close to fifty kinds of bamboo, some established in the ground, some only on the potting table. I cannot overlook the disappointments and failures that have come to me through bamboo, due to my own mismanagement and lack of direction. Alongside of a woodland I have now tried to make a terraced garden featuring various bamboos as the chief ornamentals. It is all very special to myself, my own green portion. I dote on it, dote on it in an angry sort of way because I have not done better by it. How it strikes other people I have no idea. Wandering down the path in my rococo plantation my visitors are either too surprised or too discrete to utter opinions. But I myself suffer from knowing that there are fine bamboos I should have encouraged to dominate, and lesser ones that are here more prominent. Also, the volcanic soil with which we must live and work here should have been richer with the right fraction of acid, and the stones, enthusiastically proliferating underground, should have gone softer. Above all, I should have been smarter. In other words, it sounds like life, just like life. I must not feel sorry for myself, yet the salt of disappointment savors my exotic hunger. Worst of all, does my husband, who now shared my participation in gathering bamboos, think ill of what little I have achieved? Have we not come five hundred miles north from an old southern home, guided by the hope of more space for more bamboo? But my husband is a rare, superhuman human species. He never chides.

A sharp disappointment here is that the bory does not perform with its drama of grace and dignity and its array of copious plumes hung out like big flags of green. Still, it puts on a shady, impressive bamboo performance, and each year its culms are larger and its feathery shade stretches up and up. I would never permit anyone, even the King of Savannah, to speak of it with condescension. I love it. And I have nearby an excellent stand of Phyllostachys viridis which was fortunately planted in a rich spot and flourished in consequence, proving that a difference in soil is a difference in the plant's incentive. After twenty five years it is thirty feet tall with green-striped yellow culms, and a great way of throwing itself about and bending in rain and wind, or a tranquil way of standing utterly still in placid moments. It is a lofty, magisterial, poetic creature.

I can now share bamboo with people who are starting up the road to discovery and ownership. Dr. Richard Haubrich, President of the American Bamboo Society, has permitted me to offer plants in his Journal if those who respond will come and do their own digging. This has led to some pleasant relationships and a few odd encounters, one of them with a man who arrived armed with a clip-board and a long list, a veritable catalogue of names, and began to read them off to me, checking the varieties I did not have, or did have. It was such a peculiar incident, I almost forget how it went. I finally protested, "Why is this necessary? You will know when you see what I have whether you want them." "But I wouldn't know," he answered, ''I'm not familiar with bamboo." I stared at him. "Then you are just a nut?" It was not possible to think of a more courteous or sensible explanation. He shrugged. "And may I ask the size of your property?" "One hundred feet," he said. "Oh," I continued relentlessly, "A nut and headed for trouble." I tried to sound foolishly sympathetic. The incident remains as an oddity in my mind. I cannot remember how it was concluded. Amiably, I hope, but I dare say, not too amiably.

Today there are many bamboo collectors and knowledgeable nurseries. I do not pretend to be their equal. I can only say that for many years I have lived with a plant that has been a delighter, and never a deceiver. Its meaning is the meaning of grace, a grace that drips with rain, the first rain and the second rain as my bamboo takes the storm and sluices it into the earth and the wet branches sigh and bend upon each other as the culms bear the weight of water and foliage then straighten tall when their burden eases. In the sun my bamboo dries quickly and shakes itself for another day, another weather. Small birds, the bushtits, hang their long knitted nests where no cat can climb. At night the stars sit lightly in the branches.

Recently I found a pile of shipping tags from the U.S. Department of Agriculture giving the names of species sent to me years ago. They did not all prosper, but the warm pleasure of possession by a citizen is with me still. P. pubescens, the mightly Moso. Arundinaria amabilis, the lovely name and the illustrious culm. I go around our garden wondering whether this clump or that which I have failed to identify may be one of these most desirable ones, lost but not lost forever in the poor mess of time. Some day it will all be clear, if not to me, then to one whose gaze is keener.

I trust that my grandchildren are going to enjoy the fact of bamboo in their lives. May they learn to watch for the new culms breaking through the soil and quickly rising to the rustling light above, shedding and sheathed with their curious details of dots and dashes and speckles of black and brown, or those that bear no design but are a fashionable chamois color all over, like the best gloves. Also the little whiskery ears and the ribbony blades. In all of these I take a child's pleasure, myself, not deserving the pleasure of a scientist. I hope that my young kin may notice that some sheath blades have charming stripes of pink, some are plain, some are krinkled as though got ready on curling tongs. And they always are close to a neat collar whose name a child might as well learn: ligule. All of these details are different from one kind of bamboo to another, and the differences are important, not only for identification of species, but for giving pleasure to the bamboo lover. Have I begotten any bamboo lovers? I do not know. They should be using the large culm sheath of Phyllostachys viridis today as platters for the ripe strawberries, but the Australian Cattle dog Anna has eaten all the strawberries in the bed. Well, the unexpected gains and losses of life are of much interest. Lacking the actual strawberries I had thought to present to them I may still attract the imaginations of my young folk by pointing to the clump of P. vivax with its bright green culms four inches broad. "Look at this," I say, "Thirteen years ago your grandfather and I gathered the seed and planted it. We grew this bamboo for you, and some day it will be enormous, one of the biggest and strongest. The seed is like oat or wheat, and it is thrilling to feel for it hidden inside the husk, to press with your finger and feel the little hard morsel inside." And I wish I could think of a graphic way to express the bamboo's mysterious command of time, how swiftly it grows tall, and stops forever; how, if it blooms it blooms with the same tidal fervor everywhere at once. For thousands of years in the Orient bamboo has been of supreme importance to mankind, providing the means of food, materials for building, the substance of countless artifacts, promptings for religious symbolism, the high stuff of art, even the miraculous scaffolding that holds and bends better than steel and is used in the erection of many-storied buildings. What other plant has provided an omnipresent relation between nature and man? It is reasonable, I feel, to hope that one's family may be aware of this great plant and its influence on men and women, even as poetry, art and music are civilizing possessions.

May I presume to offer advice to those eagerly beginning their collection? Like most advice it will be unwanted and discarded, giving satisfaction only to myself, for whom it is too late. However, I would say, be selective. Don't try to get everything you hear of. There is no end to that. Get only the single best for your needs, and cultivate it devoutly. Make everything that you acquire into the most perfect specimen possible. Decide what you want in a certain situation and then fill it with the one inevitable most precious bamboo. If your climate permits, have the rather tender Bambusa beecheyana or B. oldhami, both large and stately, and keep the obnoxious scale off the culms. If you can't grow one of these then have an impressive Phyllostachys for that temple psyche. And, of course, a clump of exotic P. nigra. And at the other extreme, don't forget the pretty, dwarf fern leaf, nor the white and green striped Sasa variegata, also S. veitchii, for its handsome foliage. (These last three all low.) There are two Bambusas, B. ventricosa and B. textilis that stand very well in northern California. So also does B. multiplex Alphonse Karr. And for excessive drooping grace have Otatea aztecorum which, in spite of personifying the tropics, has the spirit to endure the winter chill of the Napa Valley. Already this would give you enough to make a reputable bamboo paradise in a piece of mortal real estate 100 x 100. But it is with barely controllable lust that I turn from others, seductive, amazing or modest.

My friends, I have not long, it may be, to tarry and see how your bamboos grow. It happens that I am a very elderly woman. How poignantly I wish I might begin again and explore with you the delights and temptations of one of the most fascinating of all plants. With emotions beyond my ability to express I stare up far above my head, and then stare at my feet, at both the giant and the dwarf. I lay my tribute down. Oh yes! I wish I might begin again. Now at the end I know better how to begin.

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