Bamboo is not for the faint of heart.

Spring cleaning of the Bamboo Garden - should be easy right? It's just a grass, so it should not take more than an hour, right? Wrong in the extreme! Yes, it's a grass, but, left on it's own for even one year, it can make a solid mass of tangled branches twenty five feet tall. After mowing the grass, my husband and I went to the bamboo garden to do some cleanup that we thought would easily be done in one hour. That's not what happened. In fact, it took at least 3 hours for both of us. It required me getting on a ladder and climbing onto the roof, where I hung out, leaning over the edge, for 3 hours, often until my arms and back were wracked by spasms. At times the bamboo trimmings were so thick we could hardly see each other though we were less than 3 feet apart. It took every yard waste can we have, eight in all, stuffed full, with one of them approaching the 75 pound limit that the trash collectors will agree to lift. It took at least an hour to get them into the cans, and of course the tools were not sharp enough to cut through the bamboo which had grown tough, so in many cases, it took numerous strokes to cut them. And let's not even talk about how my back feels after all those hours of bending, cutting, and lifting. The yard waste cans clogged the alley where we hold the trash until collection day. Moving the cans to the street required wearing gloves and long sleeve shirts, but still we have lots of scratches and cuts on our arms. So why do we bother? Well, for one thing, if we don't the bamboo will overtake us, and that is something we will have to confront every year, which becomes more frightening as we are now in our sixties. At times like this we regret putting bamboo in our garden. But then, we sit down in our plum garden, and watch the bamboo that is still left moving freely in the breeze, each culm swaying gracefully and unencumbered by its neighbor. Gone are the dead, dried out and tangled branches. From the dining room, we can see the sky through the bamboo and the arbor that provides support to the bamboo. We know that the bamboo is no longer draping over the chimney, ready at any moment to turn into a torch to destroy the home we have so lovingly created. Bamboo is not for the faint of heart, or for those who want low maintenance gardens. I insist on low maintenance. This was my ONE breach of that principle, and I hope it was my last. Do I love the bamboo? Yes! But I hate it too. Such is life with bamboo.