Thamnocalamus "Kew Beauty"
Welcome to Bamboo Glade.
Bamboo Glade is a specialist nursery based on a small garden (0.05 hectares) in the South Holderness district of East Yorkshire in the north of England.
Buildings border the garden on the east and west, and tall hedges to the north and south, so this is a shady spot, no place for those plants that crave day-long sunshine and sun-baked flower beds. For much of the year the sun's visits can be all too fleeting.
But in this corner of East Yorkshire, close to the coast and the wide estuary of the River Humber, frosts are not frequent and rarely severe, and it has proved possible to grow a surprisingly wide range of plants, without having to resort to tiresome winter wrapping and mollycoddling.
The plants we principally specialise in are bamboo, ginger and banana.
Bamboo in particular, as hedges, clumps, grove and individual specimens, form the backbone of the garden, with over sixty varieties of bamboo finding a place to grow within the the limited space available. These are all hardy forms of bamboo which have no difficulty coping with the Yorkshire weather, and which co-exist happily with the many other plants in the garden.
The bamboos are mostly montane (or mountain) varieties from Western China, Japan and the foothills of the Himalayas, and the Andes of South America. These last, the chusqueas, find the coastal climate of Britain an acceptable substitute for the cool misty hillsides of their Andean homeland.
A walk around the glade should give the visitor a good idea of how the different kinds of bamboo will look in their own garden.
The bananas you will see in the glade are the root-hardy kinds, musa basjoo and musa sikkimensis. These, especially if young, are sometimes cut to the ground by a sharp frost, to grow back again the following spring. But larger specimens in more favoured positions will survive the winter better, reaching a height of three metres or more, and with luck flowering and fruiting. By high summer the huge leaves of these plants contribute more than any other to the tropical look of the garden.
Our other main specialism, the ginger family is represented by the genus hedychium. In leaf they bear a slight resemblance to cannas, but we find them far more appealing, and far less trouble. Many of them have a wonderful scent to add to their attraction. Half a dozen of the hardiest species will flower happily in this northern garden, though we tend to keep most of our hedychiums in pots for ease of propagation.
Scent is an important element in the glade, and although bamboos have little to offer in this respect, they provide shelter and setting for a large number of scented plants. There is no time in the year when this most evocative of our senses is not addressed.
Another thread that runs through the glade is variegation. Though some purists may throw up their hands in horror at the very thought, in a garden like this one, deep in shade for much of the time, variegated foliage adds welcome touches of brightness, and puts a smile on the face of the glade on a dull day.
