Bamboo Care - Trimming...Shape your bamboo once a year…only.
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Climate. Can you have bamboo in your locality? Planting in Ground. Plant the tropics in your garden. Escape Proof Bamboo. None of this running free nonsense. Planting in Pots. Bamboo stays smaller in pots. Bamboo Indoors. House training your bamboo.
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Shaping a tidy hedge
Ideal as a privacy screen, bamboo needs a minimum of trimming to maintain your preferred shape.
Bamboo should suit you. If it leans out too far, cut off the untidy bits. Once the weight of foliage drops away, the stem remaining will bounce back more upright than before.
New growth is trimmed back once a year. Once cut off, a culm will not grow any higher, odd that*.
Learn the tips and tricks of the trade so you can bamboo with confidence.
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Transplanting. Have bamboo will travel.
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Removing bamboo. How to kill an unwanted bamboo?
Trimming. Shape your bamboo once a year…only.
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Food & Water. Bamboo is easy to love.
Troubleshooting. Where there's leaf there's life.
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Glossary of Terms. New and forgotten bamboo related words.
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Before
After
Golden Bamboo at Church Point before trimming. Golden Bamboo at Church Point after trimming.
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Not very tidy, and too tall by half. Some shoots actually leaning out. Can you make it out?
It all comes neatly together
When pruning, where to cut?
Oddly* enough once trimmed to height a bamboo culm will not grow any taller.

Cut with secateurs just above a node. Or with hedge trimmers for a hard edge.
Secateurs just above a bamboo node from a different angle.
Cut your bamboo culm with secateurs just above a node.
Secateurs just above a bamboo node from a different angle
Cut your bamboo culm with secateurs just above a node

When does bamboo shoot?
Each bamboo species depends on particular seasonal stimuli to send up new shoots.
In general, Running Bamboo species shoot during spring to early summer and Clumping species shoot mid to late summer.

The best time to trim is in winter.
By then growth has stopped.
New shoots that have grown late in the autumn may wait until spring warmth to grow leaves.
It's best not to trim these bare stems as it can inhibit new leaves shooting in spring.
A bamboo pruned just above the node.
A bamboo pruned just above the node
* That’s not the only odd thing about bamboo. Do you know the strange story about the flowering of bamboo?
Bamboo culm tip,
The strange story about the flowering bamboo.