Bamboo Identification

With striking dark canes, the stems often start off green and age to a glossy ebony-black colour as they mature. It can reach about 4 m tall or more and can spread several metres from its parent plant.  The leaves are green and narrow, shaped a bit like the classic bamboo look, and typically grow up to around 12 cm long.  Compared with some straighter bamboos, black bamboo canes may arch or bow slightly rather than standing perfectly upright, giving it a graceful overall form. 

 
Often thought of as the “classic” bamboo, Fish-pole bamboo has upright beige-gold canes and narrow, pointed green leaves (around 15–20 cm long). Young stems are green before maturing to golden. It can reach up to 5 m in height and, as a running variety, may spread more than 3 m  from the parent plant. A key identification feature is the compressed, knotted nodes at the base of the canes.

Yellow-grooved bamboo is a tall running variety that can reach 4.5 m or more and spread up to 8 m. It’s identified by its mustard-yellow canes (distinct from the greener tones of golden bamboo) and slender, pointed leaves up to 17 cm long. Look for the zig-zag growth at the base of the stems — and in sunny spots, the canes may develop a reddish hue.

 
You can recognise you’ve got Moso bamboo in two ways. First, it’s one of the only bamboos that’s shaped like a tree. Secondly, it has some of the widest canes of any bamboo in the UK, at around 29 cm. It can spread up to around 8 m from the parent plant and, under the right conditions, has the potential to shoot up really quickly. The canes are robust with an apple-green colour when young, fading to a pale yellow as they mature. Unlike many other varieties, the grooves on the stems alternate sides between the nodes. Each node normally throws up two leafy branches, but the leaves are shorter than on most other garden bamboos at about 10 cm long.

Broad-leaved bamboo is easy to identify because its canes and leaves are distinctive. It’s a smaller running bamboo, usually reaching around 3 m high at maturity and able to spread up to 5 m from its parent plant. The canes form a thicket of dense, upright stems, each usually about 1 cm in diameter, and the stems are often speckled with purple. The leaves are broad and can reach about 40 cm long, dark green with a yellow line down the middle. In winter, the tips and edges often turn brown.

Arrow bamboo typically grows up to about 6 m tall and can spread around 3.5 m or more from the parent plant. It often forms sizeable thickets of olive-green canes that give it a dense, structural look.  The leaves are usually a solid green colour and can reach around 25 cm long, and sometimes they have yellow stripes along their length, with pointed, arrow-like shaped leaves. Though rare, arrow bamboo can produce flowers in the form of spikelets.  

Height: 1.5 - 2.5 m 

Hairy bamboo is a small but incredibly invasive running bamboo, known for its fast growth. It’s often the type that specialists are called in to eradicate. It can colonise an area with alarming speed. The canes are slender and stand upright rather than bending, and they’re a striking green colour with branches. The leaves are the most distinctive feature: they’re toothed (with little indents along the edges) and have a prominent yellow line down the middle. The leaves can reach up to around 20 cm long, are sword-shaped, and in winter their tips will brown.