After a night of spring rain, walk into the moso grove the next day and the ground is covered with arching mounds of earth—those are moso shoots pushing up. In one night they can gain several centimeters; in a few days they are as tall as a person.

After That Spring Night’s Rain

After one night of spring rain, walk into the moso grove the next day and the ground is covered with arching mounds—that is the shoots shouldering the soil aside. Look closely and some shoots have already broken through, their sheaths covered in a dense fuzz, tips still hanging with dew.

Moso shoots grow at an astonishing rate: they can surge several centimeters in a single night and reach head height in a few days. Farmers say watching shoots is like watching a play: the day before it was a squat little point; two days later you must tilt your head back to see its tip.

— Su Shi, Song Dynasty, “For the Green Bamboo Studio of Monk Qian” —

Better to eat without meat,

than to live without bamboo.

The Uses of Moso

It is China’s most important economic bamboo: roof beams, bamboo baskets, mats, chopsticks, rafts, paper pulp—almost everything uses it. Cut down one moso culm and nothing from top to bottom is waste: the tip makes a broom, the middle is split into strips, the base makes a chopping board.

In old farmhouses, adding a bamboo basket or a bamboo mat was a major household event; and the pedigree of such objects usually begins in the moso grove behind the mountain.

One Cannot Live Without Bamboo

Su Shi wrote, “Better to eat without meat than to live without bamboo”: without meat you grow thin, without bamboo you grow vulgar. One sentence turned bamboo from a material into a bearing. In the literary brush, bamboo is clarity, is uprightness, is integrity in joints.

Moso is the most ordinary of bamboos, yet the bamboo of poetry is mostly its shape: straight culm, dense leaves, rustling when wind passes, resounding when rain comes.

• How to know it: Large monopodial bamboo; culm up to twenty meters, long internodes; shoots in spring, sheaths hairy; spreads into groves by underground rhizomes.
• When to enjoy: Shoots peak March to May, growing fastest after a rainy night; by summer and autumn the whole grove of new culms has turned green.
• Caution: When harvesting shoots, leave the strong and remove the weak—do not dig whole patches bare; avoid large-scale cutting in the grove’s flowering years.
• Same-genus relatives: Henon bamboo, black bamboo, mottled bamboo, and henon dwarf bamboo are all close kin of the Phyllostachys genus, differing in culm color and node shape.

How a Grove Comes to Be

Moso is a monopodial bamboo: underground rhizomes creep and spread, each node setting a bud that pushes a shoot in spring; the shoot grows into a new culm, root-linked to the mother culm. So a whole grove is often the descendants of a single plant—it looks like a forest, but in fact it is one family.

It flowers with extreme rarity, often only once in several decades, and after flowering a grove commonly dies back wholesale. So grove keepers treat bamboo flowers with both unfamiliarity and dread—a plant that never blooms blooms only to say goodbye.

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Keywords: moso bamboo · spring shoot · bamboo grove · economic bamboo