Rapport de Terrain N° 005 — Trop Près

We are in a narrow space today — not exactly a rock and a hard place, but close. Three feet, maybe less, between a house and a grove of bamboo the current owners did not plant.

A tall bamboo grove arching over a driveway along a property-line fence in Seattle, blue sky above — Planted for a screen, grown into a wall — the grove crowds the property line and threatens to grow under the concrete driveway.

There are solid reasons to plant bamboo between two houses:

It screens fast — a wall of green in a season or two.
It grows tall enough to hide a second-storey window.
It stays evergreen, private through the winter.
It is cheaper than a fence or a wall.
It needs no footing, no permit, no contractor.
It is beautiful — movement, sound, light through the canes.
It asks for little — but what it needs, desperately, is the one thing the narrow space cannot give. Space.

The planting here is only two feet wide and three feet from the home, and the decision to plant was based, in part, on a recommendation from a bamboo nursery. That recommendation: bury a sheet of plastic in a two-foot-wide trench between the properties, and plant the bamboo inside the two-foot space.

A dense timber bamboo grove jammed in a tight passage between two buildings, closing overhead into a green tunnel — Jammed between two walls, a cut culm braced as a spacer — the grove closes overhead into a tunnel. The sky is nearly gone.

“Bamboo grows fast.” Three years from now, just wait. They even have a little ditty: “One year it sleeps, next year it creeps, and the third year it leaps.” The part left out of the story is that where it leaps is the invisible underground — the rhizomes.

A bamboo hedge pinched between a brick chimney and a fence, a paver path threading the narrowing passage — Pinched between chimney and fence, the passage narrows to a thread. The screen wanted room the property never had.

The bamboozled are waiting patiently, looking out their windows, waiting while the rhizomes grow below — trapped in the two-foot confinement, circling the enclosure. They were fooled into thinking the plastic barrier stops bamboo from growing. The rhizomes begin to shoot new culms anchored in half the soil they need, right up against the plastic. These fall over, and the gardeners cut them off — often stimulating new rhizome growth underground. By the third or fourth year, as the bamboo continues to “leap” exactly as the bamboozlers promised, the property owners are as trapped as the confined bamboo.

A dense bamboo screen swallowing the narrow setback between two houses, a slot of blue sky closing behind it — The two-foot strip, three feet from the house. What was planted to fill a gap has filled the whole gap — and then some.

They have an underground dragon growing on their property.

We are not here to fix this today. We are here to dig it out — and to tell you what we found. What could have been planted instead, and what such a screen truly costs, is another story, and another Rapport.

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Trop Près (too close)

May we assist you with your bamboo problem?