Discover the Bamboo Garden

At San Diego Botanic Garden, you can explore the largest living collection of bamboo in North America!

The Bamboo Garden holds a special place in SDBG’s history as the first garden planted specifically as a collection. In 2013, the American Public Gardens Association (APGA) officially accredited our bamboo collection, recognizing it as an important resource for bamboo research and preservation. Today, the collection features more than 100 species and cultivars of bamboo from around the world.

Many people know that bamboo grows in China and that it’s a favorite food of giant pandas. But bamboo is much more widespread than you might think! Bamboo grows naturally on every continent except Antarctica and Europe.

There are more than 1,000 species of bamboo around the world, and nearly half are threatened by habitat destruction. As bamboo habitats disappear, so do the plants themselves—and the many animals that depend on them, including giant pandas and countless other species.

What many people may not know is that bamboo is a grass! In fact, bamboo species are giant grasses belonging to the subfamily Bambusoideae within the grass family Poaceae. Each bamboo stem, called a culm, completes its growth in a single year, and some species can grow several feet in just one day. Certain bamboo species can reach the height of trees and form entire forests, despite being grasses. And unlike tree trunks, bamboo culms are hollow. That’s one of the features that makes bamboo so distinctive—and so fascinating to explore.

Bamboo is the fastest-growing land plant in the world. With over 1,500 uses of bamboo, it is an eco-friendly, renewable material that requires little fertilizer or pesticide to grow and few chemicals to process. While some bamboo plants need lots of water, there are many drought-tolerant species. Here are some other fun facts about bamboo:

• Produces 30% more oxygen than an equal sized stand of trees.
• Grows more than 3 feet in a day, can be sustainably harvested after only 3-5 years.
• Super strong and sturdy, can even be stronger than steel.
• Used from traditional foods to flutes and flooring.

There are two general types of bamboo: one type clumps together (clumpers) and the other type spreads out (runners). Clumpers have short thick underground stems or rhizomes. In contrast, runners have long, narrow rhizomes that can travel as far as 30 feet underground. A single runner can produce an entire bamboo forest! Due to these characteristics, it’s important to research the species, growth type, and water requirements so you don’t crowd out native species and threaten biodiversity when you plant bamboo.

Seeing a bamboo flower is rare because most woody bamboo only flower every 60-130 years, and after a plant flowers and sets seed, it usually dies. Most species of woody bamboo undergo a mass flowering event; all of the plants from the same root cutting (from the same parent plant) bloom at the same time, even if they’re on the other side of the world! This mass flowering and death of bamboo from the same root stock is another factor putting them at a high risk of extinction.

-Written by the Horticulture and Education Departments at SDBG