Asian Beauty
Once a week a meet I group of people at a bakery to practice our French conversation. Most of the people in my group are retired, so the conversation is always rather interesting for me as I am the youngest of the group. A few of the people in the group have nice, established gardens and we often talk about plants; we have even been to visit some of the member’s gardens.
Bamboo is one of the recurring conversation topics in the group. One of the members of my group loves bamboo, so every time he sees a bamboo story on the paper he always shows it to us. He also bought a shirt made of bamboo a while back. And of course, every time one of us sees any interesting information about bamboo, we always report to the group. And so I have accumulated a little bit of information about bamboo and I will share some of it with you.
Recently, I learned that bamboo is a rather difficult plant to propagate and thus the price for a tiny cutting can be quite high-say around $70 for a small plant. However, once bamboo is established it spreads quickly, so if you have it in your garden, you’d better love it or you’d better keep it in a pot. Since bamboo grows very fast, it is by excellence a renewable resource. It is also a rather versatile material. Its fibers are so strong that in Japan bamboo is used to construct high rises; you can also see cutting boards made of it as well as flooring among other things. Actually, if you want to see garden and home bamboo items, you should get the book “Bamboo Style” published by Taschen. However, bamboo also can be rather soft and you can find many clothing and house items for sale. If you’re curious, drop by Target to check out the bamboo sheets. With a 250-thread count sheet, one is sure to have sweet dreams. I bet the Earth rejoices as well!
And of course, if you want to know more, where else would you go but to Wikipedia?
