From that vantage point the Chambers' can see the first bamboo they planted in the 1980s as a means to control erosion along the river bank. Kinder Chambers says people tried to discourage him from planting that first bam boo.
'They said it would grow so fast it would cover us up,' he said. 'The first time the river flooded it washed away all the bamboo. I thought, 'So much for getting covered up with this stuff.''
Bamboo has yet to take over the Chambers' property but it has taken over a good portion of their lives. 'We met some charter members of the Texas Bamboo Society in 1991 and just got into it more and more from there,' he said. 'We got involved with that organization, and eventually the national one.'
The Chambers' have pockets of between 40 and 50 varieties of bamboo scattered about their property. The most dramatic is a variety known as p. virdis
, which created its own grove close to the river. They thought they were planting something else, but this stuff came up instead. The bamboo grove that resulted was 'a lucky accident,' Kinder Chambers said.
Most of the bamboo grown in Texas and elsewhere in the United States is not native. The only native varieties here go by the common names River Cane and Switch Cane, though cane is whole different critter, er, plant from bamboo.
Caney Creek in Wharton County, originally named Canebrake Creek, could have been Bamboo Creek if those first settlers had known the difference between bamboo and cane. They had more important things on their mind.
There are hundreds of varieties of bamboo, but two basic types: clumping and running. The clumping varieties tend to stay put, unlike their running cousins. The running variety is generally what people are talking about when they talk about bamboo 'taking over' a place.
The Chambers' do not run a commercial enterprise. They don't sell their bamboo and they don't run a nursery but they will, for a small fee, allow you to dig some up and take it home with you. Not that people are lining up for a chance to plant bamboo. The plant still gets its fair share of bad word-of-mouth publicity.
As president of the Texas Bamboo Society, Kinder Chambers hears all the horror stories. Part of the organization's aim is to stem the tide of bad publicity that bamboo gets.
Chambers' controls running bamboo by pruning the roots once a year. This consists of breaking the roots with a shovel or other implement of destruction. 'It starves the plant to death,' Kinder Chambers says. 'You have to do it once a year, though.'
The Texas Bamboo Society will hold its annual festival from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Aug. 27-28 at the Zilker Botanical Gardens in Austin. In addition to a plant sale, there will be bamboo vendors and bamboo experts like the Chambers to help them find the best bamboo for them.
'We always ask people who are interested in bamboo how much space they have, how they plan to use it and how much time they want to put into it,' Mrs. Chambers says.
Visitors to the Chambers' place, the people they meet through the bamboo society and the people who come to events like the Austin Area Bamboo Festival keep the Chambers' interested in the plant more than the plant itself.
'Really, it's not the plant that makes this so rewarding,' Mrs. Chambers says. 'It's the people you meet.'
