The world’s smartest place to go a garden-centre-ing has to be the Marché aux Fleurs on the Ile de la Cité in Paris. Like an oasis, the market draws its customers from the lofty departments of state that surround it – a cast of lawyers, politicos and latter-day Maigrets. When these movers and shakers step out for some horticultural shopping, what they are after is chic. That used to mean a camellia or some topiary for the townhouse, an English rose for the place in the country, an orchid for the mistress. But in the past few years things have changed: all that anybody who is somebody seems to want is les bambous.
The Paris bamboo craze does not signify some new outbreak of orientalism. Most of the canes that do a bundle on the quais are not destined for gardens à la japonaise or urban jungles. They tend rather to be used with discipline: well-chosen varieties grown usually in containers, often on balconies and terraces, and sometimes even pruned to harmonise with such staples of French formality as box, yew and lime trees. It shouldn’t work, this new experiment in East meets West; but it does, and the lesson to draw from it is that bamboos (the right bamboos) do not commit you to a quasi-Asiatic garden, or even to a garden at all. These tough and versatile plants can look just as elegant and at home beside classical Western buildings and vegetation as they do amid modern minimalism or the vernacular of their native countries.
UK gardeners and designers are warming to bamboos too and, in some cases, finding ingenious uses and combinations for them that outdo even the punters at the Marché aux Fleurs.
By far the most coveted plants at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, for example, were the specimens of Phyllostachys iridescens that filled Christopher Bradley-Hole’s garden, "In The Grove". This Chinese bamboo attains the stature of a small tree – but not its bulk. It possesses instead a magical lightness and openness of texture, a-flicker with foliage as fine as bamboo brushstrokes: the perfect plant to be beneath and among. Meanwhile, its sea-green canes erupt in a fountain whose base is commendably narrow and compact.
Before their arrival at the showground, Bradley-Hole’s giant bamboos had been growing comfortably in containers little larger than an oak half-barrel. Given enough water and feed, they would need no garden. The garden he did make for them, however, was triumphantly eclectic. It brought together luxuriant oriental ground cover of the sort that one would expect to see beneath bamboos, such as mosses, hostas and ophiopogon, with the unexpected – clipped yew hedges, ornamental grasses, and antique roses and peonies. The context for all this exquisite ecumenicalism was a series of cool, sharp terraces, walkways and walls that few could hope to imitate. The idea is available to all, nonetheless: a good bamboo is a star that looks best among hard structures and in the company of just a few well-chosen plant companions. In other words, they are perfect choices for small – even very small – gardens, or large containers.
But what is a good bamboo when so many of them have a bad name? Bamboos were making us incandescent with rage long before Thomas Edison used a fibre stripped from one of them as the filament of the first light bulb. The problem has been that English gardeners started with the runners and invaders, bamboos such as Pseudosasa japonica and various Sasa species which will cane it over even a short distance. The more desirable species tend to form slow-spreading orderly clumps – hence the rule of thumb that the more expensive a bamboo the less likely it will be to misbehave. We also began by growing the bores. Although it was introduced to English gardens in the Regency period, the incomparably chic black bamboo, Phyllostachys nigra, for example, took more than 150 years to become anything like widely available simply because uglier and more aggressive species – the basis for our prejudices – were running amok and discouraging us from trying out the good ones.
In my own town garden (minute, walled, and basically containerised with rectangular planters) there is no room to accommodate marauders and mediocrities, but we still manage to grow more than a dozen different bamboos. Each has its own role and character, and each creates a different tempo and mood in an area so small that it should, by rights, have no ambience at all. Taller species with colourful canes include the ebony Phyllostachys nigra, the tortoiseshell Phyllostachys bambusoides f. lacrima-deae, and Phyllostachys aureocaulis ‘Spectabilis’ in jade-striped gold that flushes amber and ruby in sun and cold. Cooler and calmer, Thamnocalamus ‘Kew Beauty’ sports verdigris canes that turn mahogany with age and swarm with minute leaves. In large pots, inky wands of Fargesia nitida bow beneath whispering pearl and pea-green foliage. As a counterweight to its shimmering gracefulness, Semiarundinaria fastuosa marches along one wall with 20ft-tall ramrod canes tinted plum and sheathed with long, apple-green blades.
These are bamboos to play the parts of small trees and large shrubs; but there are slimmer, smaller kinds for less extravagant, if no less dramatic, effects. For foliage colour, try the white-brushed Pleioblastus ‘Tsuboii’, the emerald and gold Pleioblastus viridistriatus, and the blushing, ivory-combed x Hibanobambusa tranquillans ‘Shiroshima’. And, as a clever and clippable alternative to box in shady places, there is dwarf, bushy Shibataea kumasaca, verdant either way in sharp-looking metal containers or in its classic locus among gravel and stones, with a carpet of ferns and Pachysandra terminalis at its feet. Try any one of these in a pot or the ground, and you will soon discover why in Paris and London this season’s style is bamboo.
Need to know
Bamboos are excellent natural fences. Larger types that can be planted to form screens and boundaries include Semiarundinaria fastuosa (very tall and straight) and (less formal) Phyllostachys species such as the black P. nigra and the golden P. aureosulcata ‘Spectabilis’. Planted in a line (say, 1m apart in a narrow bed) young plants will expand and coalesce within a year or two. To make an elegant divider for terraces and small gardens, plant a long narrow bed, set into paving, with just a line of black Phyllostachys nigra top-dressed with gravel or pebbles, or use bamboos grown in zinc or wooden rectangular planters.
Most bamboos are either runners or clumpers. Clump-formers are ideal for pots. Unless you have plenty of space, avoid the energetic runners Pseudosasa and Sasa. If your chosen bamboo should send up a cane where it is not wanted, just cut it off at ground level.
Bamboos will grow in sun or shade, but the hotter and more exposed their position, the more water they will need. Do not let young plants or ones in pots dry out.
They are best protected from fierce cold and drying winds: a walled or fenced site is ideal, or against the building if on a terrace or balcony.
Whether in pots or the ground, give them a rich, moisture-retentive growing medium. In pots use John Innes number 3, or a soil-less potting compost mixed with fine grit and a handful or two of granulated all-purpose feed.
Between late spring and autumn, give pot-grown bamboos a fortnightly dilute liquid feed (Miracle-Gro, for example) and an occasional hosing-down.
Large bamboos can be thinned to remove older or surplus canes throughout the year. Once the new season’s crop of canes has developed, these can be pruned of their lower branches to show off their colour and form.
Specialist supplier
PW Plants, Sunnyside, Heath Road, Kenninghall, Norfolk (01953 888212; www.pwplants.co.uk)
