09/17/2025
I must have loved gardens or nature from a very early age. I mean, we all do. How can we not?
We’re born into this World where we’re of the clouds, of the sunsets, of the trees dotting the prairies and as it turns out of the stars that we still get to see occasionally if we’re lucky.
My idea, my sense about us humans is that we come out of the womb with a set of passions or a sense of focus that if we’re lucky we get to spend our lives pursuing. Some like to heal, some like to teach, some argue beautifully and then there are the builders, the tinkerers, the creatives. We all have all of these but in our modern World we’re allowed or maybe forced to choose a specific path. Too often it’s not a path that really suits us but those are things that Marx and Engels already grappled with in an earlier time.
I mostly enjoyed being outside when I was a kid. But my grandmother’s house, a big ranch-style house in a small Texas town had beds around it and around that a couple acres of mown grass. It was crazy then and it’s still crazy now that people are so drawn to big green nothings, but I liked the little woods at the back of the property and especially the grove of trees at the fence line.
And I still like to discover groves of trees and groves of bamboo where I can find them.
Last Fall I was in Fort Worth taking another few trailer loads of bamboo to the FW Zoo. Fort Worth and bamboo don’t immediately rhyme, but it is the case that Fort Worth has some of the most beautiful groves in Texas. The Japanese Garden at the Botanic Garden is a whole other World. And the Zoo is packed with thirty different species of bamboo in and on those limestone cliffs that make up the natural edge of the Zoo. It’s a beautiful garden even though Zoos have a questionable past and present.
So anyway, there are beautiful groves of bamboo in at least half of the State. Not so much in the West. And many of them have been propagated and grown at the Utility Research Garden over the past twenty years. Here are a few shots of some of my favorites. And then our availability list below
