I had been hearing about a bamboo forest in a town near Montgomery, Alabama for a few years. My only experience with bamboo until this point was my father’s constant war with a patch of it from his neighbor’s yard that has always been on the verge of invading into his. In Prattville, Alabama, here was a designated forest of the stuff that could grow freely without the threat of annihilation. So on a recent day trip to Montgomery, I stopped at the bamboo forest to see it for myself.
A placard at the entrance stated that in the 1940’s, the owner of the 26 acre property planted four varieties of bamboo. Evidently, he was an enthusiast of exotic plants and imported a small packet of four Chinese varieties from an import company. The property changed hands several times until the city of Prattville purchased the land and opened it as a wilderness area in 1980. One of the park’s iterations before being sold to the city was as a survival training ground for the US Air Force.
Well, it was indeed a forest made up almost entirely of four different varieties of bamboo with a few scattered hardwoods. The varieties had differing coloration and placement of their nodal rings. Looking through the forest and wandering on the trails, it felt like a typical forest, except that every tree had a skinny trunk of the same diameter and was rod-straight and without limbs. The leafy canopy was only at the very top of the trunks. The forest floor was mostly bare as no sunlight could penetrate the thick canopy. There was one area where many of the bamboo had fallen, laying across each other, looking like giant pick-up sticks.
Bamboo is not a tree, but a grass. A mega-grass to be sure, but a grass just like that in your lawn or on the prairie. So I was incorrect in the paragraph above when I called the stalks of bamboo”trees” with “trunks.” There are well more than four varieties of bamboo throughout the world, all of different sizes. Some varieties are among the fastest growing plants alive, stretching four feet skyward in a twenty-four hour period. So this forest is actually a forest of grass.
Bamboo varieties either grow in clumps, spreading slowly outward like ornamental grasses, or else by runners, spreading laterally to great distances. Though bamboo was indigenous to the American South, it has mostly been wiped out. The bamboo we have now are these imported, non-native species which can be hard to control, or else they are intentionally planted for harvest as a sustainable material with many uses.
Sometimes I feel a little like bamboo—out of place and in a foreign land, planted in unknown territory. Because I have never lived outside of the South, I’m not speaking of a physical location, though I do sometimes wonder what it would feel like to live in a different geographic location.
I’m thinking more about the foreign land of widowhood, or empty-nester, or grandparent. These are all new roles for me, and I am surviving here. Not that I feel invasive, or threatened, but I can thrive at times in these roles in which I find myself. I felt this way as a new physician and later, as a new parent. These were unfamiliar and uncomfortable roles at times. I had to acclimate to them in order to survive and thrive. The most foreign role for me, obviously, was caregiver to my husband when he developed Alzheimer’s disease at such a young age.
I’m reminded of the saying, “Grow where you are planted.” Of course that can mean a physical location, but it could also carry the meaning of the different roles in your life. Grow and deepen your roots and thrive in whatever location or surrounding or role in which you find yourself. You are still you. You carry the god-spark with you wherever you end up.