Beautiful Bamboo Home Furnishings and Garden Decor

In Asia there grows a type of grass with a woody, hard hallow stem called bamboo and it is beautiful. The varieties of bamboo range from short, such as one foot in height, to other varieties that grow 10 feet or more. The popular lucky bamboo plants that you find in grocery stores is not real bamboo even though it looks like it.

Bamboo mostly grows in the tropics but other types of climates can support bamboo such as the hot desert in Arizona. Bamboo is scientifically classified by their root types and there are many root types.

Bamboo tastes good and is used a lot in Asian cooking. It has a sort of crisp texture and light, sweet flavor. It is used in stir fry cooking and generally assumes the flavor of the dish that it is combined with. It can be eaten raw but most of the time it is cooked. The Giant Panda of China loves bamboo plants and that is what they mostly eat.

Bamboo is used to make variety of households goods. Anything that can be made out of wood it seems can be made out of bamboo stalks. The possible uses of bamboo range from fencing, furniture, flooring, cutting boards and wind chimes to food, paper, medicine, musical instruments, beer, even diesel fuel.

Bamboo has been drawn for centuries and there are many beautiful drawings and paintings of bamboo. For interior decorating a bamboo poster or bamboo print on the wall can be very stunning.

The type of bamboo used in construction and households goods is called phyllostachoys pubescens, common name Moso bamboo. It is a giant bamboo with blue-green bamboo canes and dense arching foliage. The Moso bamboo pole stalks are very beautiful and grow to a diameter of 7 inches across. These stalks can tower 80 feet high with clusters of small green leaves that constrast nicely to the bamboo poles.

Moso bamboo comes from the countries of Japan and China. It is the major source of edible bamboo shoots. It can be grown in the warmer parts of the USA. It likes to be planted in the full sun or light shade and prefers well drained red clay soil.

Since bamboo is an extremely hard substance it is used as construction material as well. It does need to be chemicallly treated to prevent insects from invading and weather from rotting it. Because bamboo is a quickly growing grass and can grow in dense conditions, it is considered one of the best renewable resources on the planet.

Bamboo in the garden makes for beautiful and striking landscaping and is often used to create a privacy screen. Be sure to use some sort of root barrier to keep it from spreading into other areas. It reproduces and grows quickly and can easily take over your garden!