Bamboo Seedlings - Arundinaria gigantea

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Glen
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Bamboo Seedlings - Arundinaria gigantea

Post by Glen »

Years ago, I collected an Arundinaria gigantea clone growing in Southeast Texas. In late winter/early spring of 2014, I noticed that it was flowering. I had the clone planted in a couple spots, and all divisions of this clone flowered together. I spent hours carefully collecting the relatively few seeds that the plant had made. Many of the seeds had some apparent insect damage, but I planted them all without delay.

Three seeds germinated, but they were fairly slow growing at first, and one seedling was noticeably weaker than the others. I carefully nursed the plants along under artificial light until they showed some vigorous growth. Later in 2014, they were moved into one gallon pots. In 2015, they were moved to three gallon pots. By this fall (2016), they had produced a large number of small diameter rhizomes circling around the pots, and the weaker seedling had caught up to the other two.

I recently planted one of the seedlings in the ground, and I plan to plant the other two in the next few months. Here is a picture of the three plants in three gallon pots:

Image

As a side note, the flowering clone bloomed again early the next year (2015), but I was not able to get any additional seeds to germinate. All divisions of this clone died after flowering. Another clone of the same species, collected about seven miles away from the flowering clone, has not shown any signs of flowering.

For those that have experience with this species, has anyone seen a flowering clone that survived the flowering event?
johnw
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Re: Bamboo Seedlings - Arundinaria gigantea

Post by johnw »

Great rescue and the seedlings look so healthy.

Are there historical records of the flowering of the native US Arundinaria and the outcome?

johnw - +11c & v low cloud cover.
johnw coastal Nova Scotia
Tarzanus
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Re: Bamboo Seedlings - Arundinaria gigantea

Post by Tarzanus »

Looking great, congrats!
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Re: Bamboo Seedlings - Arundinaria gigantea

Post by john voss »

I can't answer your question- but that's great that you got seeds and got them to work. I have collected specimens of the species from several states and various locations in Louisiana. a great plant- and extremely variable. I have not figured out how to grow them without a lot of bacteria related leaf browning(?). and I recently learned in a disease article on this website that there are deciduous and non deciduous forms of this species. I have not seen flowers .
zone 8b near folsom,la.
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needmore
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Re: Bamboo Seedlings - Arundinaria gigantea

Post by needmore »

john voss wrote:I can't answer your question- but that's great that you got seeds and got them to work. I have collected specimens of the species from several states and various locations in Louisiana. a great plant- and extremely variable. I have not figured out how to grow them without a lot of bacteria related leaf browning(?). and I recently learned in a disease article on this website that there are deciduous and non deciduous forms of this species. I have not seen flowers .
There is a photo of A gigantea in LA in the Bamboos of the Americas (I think that is the title) photo caption says "dated 1905 or 1906". In the photo a man with a hat on sits atop a horse. The top of his hat is maybe 1/3 the height of the canes in the grove, putting them over 30' no?

Never seen it that size in Indiana. We (FoxD 7 Brian & I) did find a native grove in a state park in Indiana. It was really pretty A gigantea that was unique from any other native types I'd seen - long, very dark green leaves and the canes were perhaps 10-12' tall. As we were about to leave we noticed that on one far end of the grove the type suddenly switched to a large grove of short bushy looking bamboo. There was a clear demarcation where the type changed significantly, I've always wondered if it was sunlight related (didn't seem that different) or if one section was from a recent flowering and the rest wasn't?
Brad Salmon, zone 12B Kea'au, HI
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Glen
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Re: Bamboo Seedlings - Arundinaria gigantea

Post by Glen »

I have only seen the plant in Texas, on the western edge of its native range. I have not noticed much obvious variability in this geographic area, but I would expect it to show variability over its large native range. Where I have seen it, the species is usually confined to the immediate borders of rivers and streams.

It is interesting to consider how different the landscape must have been when significant natural bamboo-dominated ecosystems existed in this country. For anyone who is interested in history, the following book is worth reading. It contains some remarkable descriptions of the original "canebreaks", as they were before the introduction of large-scale agriculture:

Early Times in Texas, by John Crittenden Duval
https://books.google.com/books?id=YPU0A ... &q&f=false
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