Where my new rocks went

In case you were wondering where the rocks went that I talked about in my last post, wonder no more. Some went in the succulent beds in the backyard, others were for a small but urgently needed update just inside the front yard fence.

First let’s rewind to March 2010. Look at the bamboo in the center of this photo:

Bambusa chungii ‘Barbellata’ (center) in April 2010, shortly after planting. The other two bamboos (right and left) are long gone.

This cute little bamboo is now a behemoth 30 ft. tall:

Bambusa chungii ‘Barbellata’ in April 2026. The tallest culms are now as tall as the house.

Bambusa chungii is a clumping bamboo, a non-invasive type that grows in tight, contained circles instead of spreading aggressively underground like the common running bamboos. Still, over time the clump gets wider and wider until new shoots (called “culms”) appear in adjacent areas where they’re not wanted. Here’s an example:

New shoot popping up in the adjacent agave bed...

...right next to my biggest Agave albopilosa

And this is just one example. I’ve lost track, but I must have removed at least two dozen stray culms this year (fortunately, they’re easy to snap off).

There’s no bulletproof fix short of taking out the bamboo altogether, something I’m not ready to do at this point. I fully expect that some new culms will continue their wayward ways. I can’t stop them, but what I can do is slow them down and redirect them so they don’t mess with my agave bed too much.

To this end, I removed the plants and the soil right next to the bamboo clump:

Then I laid down ½-inch hardware cloth...

...topped with a large slab of rock and half a dozen concrete pavers:

Bamboo shoots are soft and tender when they first emerge but can exert surprising upward pressure, reportedly breaking even through thin asphalt. Still, I’m hoping that my solution will be strong enough to either cause new shoots to abort or to redirect them. It’s possible they’ll emerge even farther away from the clump, but I’ll deal with that if and when the time comes.

I put back the soil I had dug out and added some more for extra height. Then I played around with the placement of a few new agaves:

I used the three sample pieces of onyx I’d gotten earlier in the week, and it quickly became obvious that I needed more. Another trip to Dixon Landscape Materials was in order:

Another van load of onyx

I decided to be conservative in my plant choices because there isn’t that much room.

Ultimately, I planted only three new agaves:

Agave parryi var. truncata in the back, Agave parrasana ‘Impressionist’ (the variegated one in the middle), and a clumping dwarf form of Agave oteroi in the lower right:

The agaves on the left were already there: Agave subsimplex, Agave pintilla, and Agave albopilosa.

As I already said, this won’t fix the problem, but hopefully it’ll make it better. And the onyx really does look good.

© Gerhard Bock, 2026. All rights reserved. To receive all new posts by email, please subscribe here.