To expand on a couple of Kinder's comments…
· It's true that most bamboo seeds, when purchased via EBay or other online sources, turn out to be disappointing at best. Most often, as Kinder said, the seeds are just what happened to be available at the time regardless of what species they were sold as. Even if the seeds were directly sourced from a positively identified mother plant, the resultant seedlings may not come close to resembling the parent bamboo. There's always the possibility that the pollinating parent bamboo is a different species.
· When large amounts of viable seed become available after a gregarious flowering there always seems to be excitement and statements about being able to plant thousands of hectares, inexpensively. This one has been a head-scratcher to me. If I question the logic, the defensive answer is usually something like "…growing from seed is the most-natural form of propagation". First, vegetative propagation does occur naturally and fairly often in bamboo forests. Beyond that, it's not natural if humans remove natural selection from the process. Usually, in nature, reproduction in copious numbers means that only a small percentage of the strongest, most superior offspring are meant to mature. When humans germinate millions of bamboo seeds in controlled environments to mass-plant in plantations, the result is often like the Thai Dendrocalamus asper failure in the 1990s. Only a small percentage developed into vigorous, shoot-productive clumps.
Kinder – seeds from some bamboo species can look like wheat. The appearance of seeds is actually quite variable and some species, or at least genus, can be identified by their seed.
R.Saporito
From: bamboo-plantations@yahoogroups.com [mailto:bamboo-plantations@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2015 1:51 PM
To: bamboo-plantations@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [bamboo-plantations] Flowering of Phyllostachys propinqua or any Bamboo
Intermittent flowering, such as you and others have mentioned, NDzana, is known as "sporadic" flowering, and in most such, cases the plants DO NOT die, AND the seeds are often sterile... (Which may be one reason Boo seeds have a 'history of poor germination.) Keep it well watered (not drowned), and fertilized== any good high nitrogen lawn fert. ).. i.e, plenty TLC.. (Tender Loving Care)..
If the complete plants flower, and drop seeds, this would be called "gregarious" flowering, and most often all plants of THAT clone, will die. BUT those seeds WILL be viable, which is how Bamboo has self propagated itself, for thousands of years..
Most, Bamboo seeds, also have a fairly short shelf life, even if refrigrated, so did't plan on holding any seed, for longer periods of time..
As a side note, these factors above, is why most offers of Bamboo seed off the internet, are bogus.. They will "sell you" whatever species, you request, but htat you get will most likely NOT be the speices, you wanted, and in a few cases, have not even been bamboo seeds at all. (Boo seeds look somewhat like wheat--don't know if this is 100% or not-- Maybe some of you REAL bamboo experts can advise me on that point.),
Peace, love and blessings to ll. Kinder C w/ Tx Bamboo Society..
In a message dated 7/22/2015 7:23:02 A.M. Central Daylight Time, bamboo-plantations@yahoogroups.com writes:
Thanks for your contribution.
The bamboo flowering phenomenon is characterized by the production of seeds, followed by the drying of the whole grove.
So if P. propinqua has flowered many times in Germany as you say, shall this really be called flowering? A subsequent question is: did these flowerings provoke the drying of respective stands? I will observe what happens for my stand.
Greetings from Hamburg
Ndzana
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Dr.-Ing. Ndzana
Hamburg
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