The great blooming bamboo mystery is solved at last

Press, 2 November 1979, Page 13

The great blooming bamboo mystery is solved at last

There is an air of expectancy among bamboo fanciers. The Umbrella Bamboo, which no more than a handful of living persons has seen in flower, is beginning to bloom all round the world. It flowers once in a 100 years. When it has flowered, it dies, leaving its seeds to form the basis of a new plant which will have to wait another 100 years before it can flower. Almost unique among plants, it seems to possess a timing mechanism which * tells it when to flower. Even new cuttings retain this mechanism; when the time comes, cuttings and parents alike will flower and then perish. How the plant does this is a total mystery. The Umbrella Bamboo and its close relation the Fountain Bamboo are garden plants in Britain and America. All the Umbrella Bamboos in cultivation i today derive from a single ■ source — a plant sent from China in 1910 by Ernest Wilson, a famous plant hunter.

Wilson — nicknamed "Chinese Wilson” because of his success in finding attractive plants on his

travels in China — sent the Umbrella Bamboo plant to Harvard, who* in turn gave a single potted bamboo to Kew in 1913. The Harvard plant died, but the Kew- version survived and is believed to be the origin of all Umbrella Bamboos in cultiva-

tion today. Wilson did not discover the plant; credit for that belongs to an Irish bot-

anist, Dr Augustine Henry, and a French Abbe, Guillaume Farges. Travelling in China in the 1880 s, they had the extraordinary good fortune to see the plants in flower.

Since then the Umbrella Bamboo has literally vegetated. While its "flowers are nothing special — the bamboo is technically a grass — this has been something of a frustration to botanists, who need to see the flowers of a plant before they can decide its genus and species. The plant has been repeatedly reclassified. Twice it has been declared a new genus, twice classified as an existing genus, four times given new species names.

At last the uncertainty is over. Earlier this year an Umbrella Bamboo flowered in Denmark and branches were sent to the leading world authority on bamboos, Dr Thomas Soderstrom, Curator of Botany at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He established that the

plant was a member of the genus Thamnocalamus, originally described in 1868. Its full and proper name is now Thamnocalamus spathaceus (Franchet) Soderstrom — quite a handle for quite a plant.

Dr Soderstrom believes that the first flowerings in Denmark mark the beginning of a flowering period which may last several years. It is a sight that nobody will get a chance of seeing twice. The Fountain Bamboo, last known to have flowered in 1886, may also be on the verge of bursting bloom. For gardeners it should be a rare treat, Dr Soderstrom writes in the journal “Garden,” published by the New York Botanical Garden. At Kew, there are as yet no hints of flower. Indeed, there seems to be some uncertainty there whether the parent plant has survived. “The trouble is we can’t really tell until it flowers, and it hasn’t yet,” a Kew man said.

By

NIGEL HAWKES,

“Observer,” London