The most beautiful timber bamboo garden there is - and it's my own yard- Growing big timber bamboo.

I'd like to share with you my bamboo garden, which I believe may be one of the nicest bamboo gardens in the United States and it's right here in my own yard. The property is named Wildwood and is over 80 years old. I've been here for the past 30 years and I will admit it is wild. This bamboo is somewhere between 40 and 80 years old, not really sure. And as to what type of it is, I don't know that either. I sent some pictures to some experts on the internet and they thought it might be Philostachys nigra henon or also known as henon bamboo. But they said it could also be vivax or mosso bamboo. I'm going to send them some pictures when it sprouts again this year and maybe from that they'll be able to tell what it is. I did read that henon is generally less than three and a half inches in diameter and most of this bamboo is over four inches in diameter. So I'm not sure if it's henon. If anyone watching this video thinks they know what it is, let me know in the comments section. Bamboo, a grass, is the fastest growing plant on the planet. My bamboo is about 50 feet tall. There are over 1400 species of bamboo in the world. Bamboo releases 30% more oxygen into the atmosphere and absorbs more carbon dioxide compared to an equivalent stand of trees. So really bamboo is an amazing plant. This is my bamboo as it grows upwards towards the sky trying to get as much sunlight as it can. This bamboo didn't always look this nice. As you can see from these pictures it looked pretty horrible. This is 30 years of poor upkeep of the bamboo. Five months ago my wife and I decided to go ahead and make an effort to clean it up. We bought a chipper and a cordless sawzall and we went to work on it and we left pretty much only bamboo that is green and growing straight up as you can see here. Also we put a sidewalk in as there were some stepping stones and they were kind of cumbersome to walk on and I think the sidewalk has added a lot of beauty. This is my wife Janine. Janine, see if you can shake that bamboo. Boy that is really solid isn't it? Yeah. Let's tell the audience here or the people that what you thought of cleaning out this bamboo and how hard it was. It was work. It took a long time but I guess that's because we hadn't been tending to it like every season like we should. Yeah it was 10 years of or more 20, 30, 40 years of dead bamboo. Yeah but the other side of it is we don't have to mow a lawn. That's true. We just have to take out some big pieces of bamboo every once in a while. Hey Janine what's your favorite tool for working on the bamboo? That would be the sawzall with the extended life battery. Yeah yeah that would that makes quick work of it. This is the cordless Makita sawzall with a pruning blade. I'm going to show you how well this thing works. We're going to go ahead and cut this bamboo right here and see how this thing works. Cut right through it like butter and now bottom of the root off. Yeah this thing works great. It's a must-have if you have bamboo. Here's the Powerking chipper we bought for chipping the dead bamboo that we cut. Saved us a lot of time and worked well. I made a separate video on this chipper if you're interested. In the very far back edge of my property there's bamboo growing which I don't take care of. I just want you to see how bad it can look if you don't keep up with it. When I bought this property 30 years ago I realized I needed to put some kind of barrier in to keep the bamboo away from the house. So right where the sidewalk is I put in a 30 I mean a three foot deep aluminum barrier and it worked real well to keep the bamboo out. That was until about five months ago when I found a nice big rhizome growing right across the barrier in towards the house as you can see over here. This is one of the rhizomes that I actually pulled out of the ground. I just kept it for this video. So what I decided to do at that point was put in a new barrier and that's when the sidewalk idea came into play and we put in a two foot deep trench right under the sidewalk. So when we poured the cement I got a barrier and a sidewalk all in one. Here's a close-up of the rhizome. You can see the small roots coming off the rhizome. These rhizomes make nodes that can sprout brand new bamboos. If you can I think it's a great idea to put in a cement walkway along the edge of your bamboo. It gives a wonderful contrast between the bamboo and the walkway and just makes the bamboo look more beautiful when it runs right up to the edge. Also you can use a cement walkway as a barrier. I thought I should say something about caring for the bamboo. In the winter not much goes wrong. It doesn't get lower than 30 degrees here. I don't give it any fertilizer and in the summer I do water it about 40 minutes twice a week. This bamboo right here is so thick you literally cannot walk through it. Maybe six to eight inches between each bamboo. Just gorgeous. We're going to pan upwards. You can see how beautiful this bamboo is as it grows towards the sky. We're going to walk through this grove so you can see what it's like to be in the midst of all this bamboo. Pretty incredible. I thought it would be fun to try to find the biggest bamboo in this entire grove so I went through with some blue tape and marked all the bamboos that I thought were the biggest. We're going to go ahead and measure them with some calipers and find which one is the largest. We'll go ahead and start with this bamboo. We'll go ahead and see what it is using this caliper right here. 4.39 inches in diameter. Here's another one. Let's see what this one is. 4.5 inches. So this is a little bigger. This is a very large looking one. Let's see what this measures. 4.6 inches. 4.69 inches. This is the biggest so far. To my eye this looked like the biggest bamboo on the property. Let's see what it measures. 4.7 inches exactly. This is the biggest bamboo. I'm going to back up the camera to give you a better look of this of this bamboo right here. So this is the biggest bamboo in the property. 4.7 inches in diameter. This thing is a monster. It's like a tree. It cannot be moved at all and it is so big and thick. This is literally the alpha bamboo for this entire property. Beautiful. A few years ago I was curious how fast this bamboo grows. So when this bamboo was this height I put a mark on the bamboo next to it and that's May 5th. Then two days later it was this height and I put a mark on it and it says May 7th. So we're going to see how much it's grown in two days. And it's 20 inches. So this bamboo is growing 10 inches a day. Pretty incredible. I hope you like this video on my bamboo garden. If you like the video give it a thumbs up and subscribe. And let me know in the comments how your bamboo garden is doing.