Semiarundinaria fastuosa - Medium-sized Bamboo

Semiarundinaria fastuosa is a remarkable Bamboo with exceptional qualities, ideal for creating tall hedges, privacy screens, and windbreaks. Low-maintenance and extremely hardy, it is beautifully decorative, with its compact columnar habit, coloured culms, and beautiful dense foliage. Its aesthetics, its striking appearance, and the rustling of the wind through its foliage will transport your garden to the Land of the Rising Sun!

Belonging to the grass family (Poaceae), the Semiarundinaria fastuosa is a majestic clumping Japanese bamboo, with an extraordinarily vertical and compact columnar habit, and rapid and vigorous growth. This tall bamboo forming narrow 2 m (6.6 ft) wide columns, has very straight and cylindrical bright canes, of a beautiful medium green colour, striated with purple-brown, and measuring 4 to 6 cm (2.4 in) in diameter. They take on beautiful purple hues as they mature, especially in sunny locations, and turn orange in autumn. These culms, like large vegetal organs, rise up to 7 m (23 ft) and bear short branches along their entire length. Its evergreen, dense, and flexible foliage is composed of large shiny green lanceolate leaves, about 10 cm (4 in) long. The culm sheaths are pearly and shiny in colour. They remain attached to the canes for 3 months before falling, creating a beautiful contrast between the colour of the sheath, the colour of the culms, and the colour of the leaves.

This bamboo, with its compact columnar habit, dense evergreen foliage, coloured culms, and wind resistance, is ideal for creating tall hedges, to create a beautiful green screen, hide a view, or form a windbreak. For hedge planting, a planting distance of 1 m (3.3 ft) to 1.50 m (3.3 ft) between each bamboo should be respected. Semiarundinaria fastuosa can also be planted as a standalone clump in the garden, along with other bamboos or large trees, such as Japanese Maples. It can, of course, be planted with Asian plants, such as Azaleas, Rhododendrons, Sacred Bamboos, Camellias. All these uses will create highly exotic and striking scenes.

This giant Bamboo has been awarded the Award of Garden Merit by the Royal Horticultural Society for its exceptional ornamental qualities. The young shoots of this bamboo are edible.