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AnalogDog
8th April 2008, 05:19 PM
I got this skinny little bamboo as a present about 2 years ago. At that time it was in a 2 gallon pot. Now it is 3-4 feet in diameter at the ground, and 6-8 feet high. I live in Washington State, just north of Seattle, in USDA Zone 8b.

The stems are quite skinny only about 1/4" at the base. It is hard to say that it is clumping or not. I understand the general defination of clumping is that the rhizomes do not extend more than the thickness of the stem before surfacing. While this plant is not highly invasive, it appears that it extends on the order of 10x the stem width before surfacing.

Looking around at different sites on bamboo, there seem to be few that have such thin stems The stems are medium to dark green with about 4" between nodes. At each node, there appear to be 3 to 6 branches that are formed.

After working the key at bamboo identification I am thinking that it may be Sarocalamus, but the crux is whether I should call it clumping or non-clumping.

AnalogDog
10th April 2008, 06:31 PM
I bumped into a geographically local site to me, and Shibatea kumasaca spells out perfectly to what it must be. I will bring it by a local seller, but for right now, I am pretty confident.

sasa fool
11th April 2008, 02:07 PM
Definetly not S. kumusaca, it looks like it may be one of the Fargesia - but I am not certain of that. You might look at photos of F. dracocephala 'Rufa' as the overall form looks like that but the shoots don't quite look right so it may be another member of that genus, F. scabrida is another possibility.

S. kumusaca has a very unique leaf shape that this plant does not have and it sure looks to be a clumping species, that info about clumpers not shooting out more than the culm diameter is not at all accurate, they can & will come up several inches out; in some species several feet out.

BTW the Fargesias tend to prefer less sunlight, perhaps your sun there is not too strong but that may explain the slight bleaching effect I think I see in the photo.

Dean W.
11th April 2008, 08:48 PM
Good luck! Now you got me hooked.