The common meaning of the word bamboo simply refers to the canes, that we all can recognize, maybe also discriminating them from the common stream canes. We don't refer to any specific type of cane, when we use the popular idiom "sono nelle canne" (I'm in the canes", that is "I'm in trouble"), as we simply mean a tangled situation, a bad period.

But for a bamboo's lover it means a recall to most relaxing moments of the day. In the popular conception the canes are negative, they are weeds to be kept away from gardens and cultivations, they can only be plant where nothing else can grow.

We have to know things, before appreciate or disdain them. What are bamboos in the vegetal reality? They belong to the Gramineae family, which also includes sweet corn, rice, wheat, sugar cane and the ordinary grass...

Bamboo is a giant grass; it's beautiful to find 600 different species, each of them owing specific characteristics, while they all have a cylindrical stem, empty inside, smooth outside, with spaced rings, the knots, and a good flexibility on the length, that determines the stubborn resistance.

The young Japanese judoka have been always recommended to be like bamboos, that bend when pushed, and then soon become erect again. There are dwarf bamboos, from one to three meters high. And there are spectacular bamboos of twelve, twenty, even thirty meters high.

Bamboos does give a special charm, just because they are "unique" plants, with their lance-shaped papery leaves, bright green even in winter time, when most of all the other plants show bare branches. Then their amazing growth. When the buds get out of the ground, disorderly, each specie with its own shape and colour, red, powdery, moustached... they begin to grow hand over fist.

They reach the final high (8-10-15-20 meters or more) in less more than a couple of months, raising their stems with lateral branches and leaves. According to the species, these stems can e green, blue-green, black, yellow with green stripes, green with yellow stripes, leopard skin...

The colour also, as well as the shape and the knots position, determines the different species. The flowering is another astonishing spectacle offered by bamboos. It's delayed at irregular intervals, 30-60-120 years, like an alarm clock genetically programmed: when it happens, the plant dies.

Then entire populations of bamboos die, and the involved species bloom at the same time all over the world. Bamboos have a remarkable aesthetic value, which can by itself easily qualify a garden, as long as it is wide enough to hold the wandering of their rhizomes (underground string roots), which could unpredictably invade any site.

I suggest anyone fond of gardening to experience the joy of growing bamboos, even with an high growth, in order to give their gardens a "magic" renewal.