Posted by Sunset, September 8, 2009 in Events
By Jim McCausland, Sunset Magazine
Bamboo feeds people and pandas, provides wood for everything from floors to jewelry boxes, and adds an exotic, almost musical charm to gardens (the wind blowing through the leaves is lovely). To celebrate this most noble grass, the American Bamboo Society is having its annual conference at the Hotel Murano in Tacoma, Washington, October 1-4. You can register during the next week and save $25 on the whole conference, or sign up any time before the conference for the whole thing or for individual days.
The tours caught my eye: visits are scheduled to Bamboo Garden of Washington, the Pt. Defiance Zoo, Washington State University's bamboo test gardens in Puyallup, and the Rhododendron Species Foundation garden in Federal Way. (You could hardly want better companion plants in the garden, since rhododendrons and bamboo grow side by side in Asia.)
You can also buy bamboo at the conference, along with some very cool products: how could you leave without a bamboo-fabric T-shirt and matching baseball cap?
Himalayan bamboos are attracting a lot of attention these days because high altitude gives them hardiness that translates well to Northwest gardens. Many of them are also clumpers, so they won't get away from you and take over the landscape. You can learn about these and other promising new bamboos at conference talks, and mix with like minded, bamboo loving gardeners, which is half the fun.
This should be an especially good conference because the Northwest is such a strong bamboo-growing region. Gardeners love it, and several commercial growers feed their passion (I reported on Bamboo Garden of Oregon in a blog last May).
The bamboo pictured here, by the way, is Phyllostachys aureosulcata 'Spectabilis'—one of my personal favorites.
