Bamboo at the Hoyt Arboretum

Working from home has a lot of benefits. My commute is a breeze. I don't have to deal with traffic. I save money on gas. I can get up from my computer periodically to stretch my legs and move sprinklers around the garden...and then get distracted pulling weeds and evaluating the health of the plants, what needs reworked, what should move where, etc., etc. Without self-control, that last one is a benefit that quickly turns into a drawback. Then there's the fact that it's easy to let weeks pass where you hardly leave the house, except for running errands. It really is important to make time for fun days and actually leave the property. With the garden I'm responsible for feeling more like a prison than a sanctuary, I decided to run away for the day to walk around a garden I don't have to take care of.

I've had a running obsession with bamboo (see what I did there?) for most of the past year. I thought it might pass, but it's still going strong. I heard that the Hoyt Arboretum has a bamboo collection that's filling in nicely, so I wanted to take a look. Once I got there, I remembered that I had glimpsed on a previous trip to the Hoyt, but kept walking through the conifers and never made it back to the bamboo. This was before my bamboo crush really started in earnest.

The bamboo collection inhabits a relatively tiny circle in the conifer area of the arboretum. I'm kind of hoping they'll expand it somewhere, perhaps up the open slope (beyond the bamboo in the photo below) that looks damp and a little unstable. A few bamboo groves up the slope would take care of that.

I couldn't see labels for all the plants, or reach all the labels I could see with my lens. And then there were the ones that I just neglected to take a photo of. Oops. This is a Phyllostachys vivax cultivar, either 'Aureocaulis' or 'Huangwenzhu Inversa'. Memory suggests the latter, but that's proven unreliable before.

I love the darker green foliage on this bamboo.

And the wonderful clouds of foliage on bamboo in general.

This is a young stand of Qiongzhuea tumidissinoda, or Chinese walking stick bamboo. I should have taken a photo of the knobby canes that give this plant its name, but I was entranced by the lovely, arching, feathery foliage. For photos and information on this interesting running bamboo, visit the Bamboo Garden Nursery page. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, nor am I receiving anything for promoting them. They're just local and have one of the largest selections of bamboo in the PNW. I've spent a lot of time on their website, drooling.

A little art installation, suspended over a large and lush sedge of some sort in a water catchment basin in the bamboo garden.

I didn't see a label on this small ground cover bamboo, but I'm guessing it's Sasa veitchii. It makes a beautiful, weed-suppressing cover under taller bamboos or shrubs.

Even with workers fixing a step at one end of the garden, I enjoyed the peacefulness of the bamboo swaying in the light breeze.

Not sure which Phyllostachys this is. Possibly Phylostachys vivax 'Huangwenzhu'?

A little bamboo mite damage. It's not really a good thing, but I kind of like the patterns they make on the leaves.

Bright, feathery, layered bamboo with towering Douglas firs in the background.

As the bamboo garden is rather small, I spent another couple hours walking the redwood trail and the oak collection. I didn't take many photos, just enjoyed being among the beautiful mature trees. The stream trail, below the redwood trail, is where I photographed the exposed roots on this western hemlock. People have unfortunately made a habit of scrambling down from the trail above it and walking across the roots. But that aside, the roots are fascinating to look at from the trail on the other side of the creek, where I'm standing.

There are umbellularia seedlings everywhere. In a hundred years or so they'll look magnificent mingling with the conifers.

Mossy Taxus brevifolia. I want this at home.

Mossy trees, vine maples, and sword ferns. It doesn't get much more Pacific Northwest than that. And I love it. Oh, how I love it.

A weeping fountain of clumping bamboo down the road from the bamboo garden, at the start of the Cedrus deodara grove.

One more shot of the bamboo. I love looking up through the canopy.

Back at home, every time I walk through the garden these days I think about where I could put more bamboo (and a loquat or two, and a few silver oaks, and...) even though I'm trying to simply keep it watered and weeded to pass it off to my parents for them to keep or alter what they will. I should be focusing on studying so I can make a living to afford a garden that's truly mine. It's hard for a plant addict not to garden where they are, though, and think about ways to improve it.

Thanks to the logging last year, this shade garden now gets quite a bit of afternoon sun. My solution this year was to plant bamboo between the fence and the garden. There's plenty of room there for a small grove. I got a division of Phyllostachys viridis 'Robert Young' from a friend and have watered it dutifully this summer. See the slag pile (branches, roots, etc. left behind after logging) in the center of the photo? The bamboo is a couple of barely-visible wispy canes on the left edge of that pile. At least from this view. Of course that slag pile is way on the other side of the fence in the neighbor's property and the bamboo is on our side.

I've been enjoying watching new leaves come out on the branches, especially early in the morning when they have water droplets hanging from the ends of each leaf. I was hoping for new canes, too, but I suppose they'll show up next year.

The canes are a golden yellow with green stripes.

Looking up into the foliage of a single cane. I chose 'Robert Young' because it was, for one thing, free (gotta love gardening friends, but also because it's a slow spreader, at least in the PNW. I could have shopped around for one of the more sun-tolerant clumping bamboos, but that would have involved spending money and I wanted something looser than most clumpers. The slow-spreading nature of this particular running bamboo means it shouldn't be too difficult to contain. It's not going to send out 10-foot rhizomes and take over. 

Of course, now I am looking at spending money on more bamboo. This spot in the shade garden is big enough for a clumping bamboo, if I take out the Calycanthus occidentalis seedling and the Rubus lineatus...

And I would love something like Shibataea kumasaca filling in this area to the right of the path...

 This has been one of my favorite vignettes in the garden this summer, and doesn't need reworking, though the portion of this bed off-frame to the right does need the Carex comans thinned.

Unfortunately, the Acer metcalfii in the back of this bed likely won't make it through another wet spring. The dead, black bark could be caused by several different bacteria or fungi. It hasn't made it around the entire trunk, so the tree is still alive and healthy-looking, but it usually puts out a second flush of new growth in the summer and this year it only did that on a couple branches. It may be possible to treat the infection and save the tree, but it would become an ongoing battle. I'd rather let nature take its course and replant with something more disease resistant if the tree dies. Like a gardening grim reaper, I'm actually hoping the maple will die quickly so I can replace it with a clumping bamboo.

The big leaf bed is another area that has me thinking of bamboo, specifically Indocalamus tesselatus. Naturally, it has some of the largest leaves of any temperate bamboo, fitting the theme of this bed where I grow big-leaved rhododendrons and other large-leaved plants like Tetrapanax papyrifera.

I planted castor beans in this area to help fill it out this summer. Unfortunately, I started them quite late. They are growing well, but somehow I don't think they'll shoot up 5 or 6 feet between now and when fellow garden bloggers and gardening friends descend upon the garden in September. Ah, well.

Several other spots in the garden, some of which are already home to other plants, are marked in my mind for sun-tolerant clumping bamboos like Chusquea (and a few loquats if I can find room). It's not very likely to happen, though, as it would involve buying plants and getting rid of others and I'm not supposed to be making any more major changes to the garden. I'm also plotting a less-ambitious collection of bamboo in containers, including the aforementioned Indocalamus tesselatus and Shibataea kumasaca, as well as Pleioblastus akebono, Pleioblastus viridistriatus, Phyllostachys nigra, and maybe Sasa palmata. Then again, I shouldn't really spend money on those, either. Maybe just one, to start?