Bamboo

Bamboo is a tall, woody plant that is, strictly speaking, a grass. Some species are among the fastest-growing plants in the world, able to grow up to about 90 centimetres in a single day.^[1] On a quiet day in a bamboo forest, it is said, you can hear it creaking as it grows. This makes bamboo the only lawn that needs a ladder to mow.

Growing

A bamboo shoot comes out of the ground already as wide as it will ever be, and then simply gets longer, very quickly, by stretching each of its segments. It reaches its full height in a single growing season and then spends the following years becoming harder and woodier. A bamboo stem is, in other words, finished early and then spends years on the paperwork.^[2]

Flowering

Many bamboo species flower very rarely, at intervals of decades, and in some species more than a hundred years. When they do, all the plants of that species flower at roughly the same time, wherever they are in the world, even if they were grown from cuttings and taken to other continents. Then, having flowered, they usually die back.

Botanists do not fully know how the plants keep time. It is the only known case of a plant keeping an appointment made a century in advance, which is more than can be said for most meetings.

See also

• Red panda – a keen eater of it
• Tree – what it looks like but isn't
• Skyscraper – another fast-rising thing

References

1. Shoot, S. (1997). Overnight. Grove Press.
2. Stretch, S. (2004). “Finished Early”. Journal of Grasses 90: 1.
3. Century, C. (1912–2032). The Appointment. Forthcoming.