I chose Larry Hess of Bloom Landscaping to clean up my bamboo hedge, remove the morning glory and replace a portion of the decaying picket fence, because I knew him from the SORO Green Team. With Paula Waxman he had designed the Hami Garden and organized the planting of new trees on Robertson. But we had not foreseen the necessity of removing the bamboo entirely, which in turn forced us to replace the entire length of the old wood fence behind it; so the timing was somewhat backwards. The carpenters had already been booked for the weekend, but it took 8 gardeners working for 2 days to rip out by hand that huge amount of bamboo (see post), so they decided to leave the spare live strands standing, because digging up all the roots would have taken too long. That’s how it happened that the new redwood fence was built first, then some time later the gardeners came back to finish the job of uprooting the bamboo. Bamboo shoots are surely going to sprout back in some parts of the garden, and the morning glory will keep coming over to my side from my neighbor’s backyard, so we’ll have to keep a close watch.
If you wish to remove these invasive plants, here’s some tips.
How to Kill a Bamboo Plant.
Morning Glory, a vine type weed.
Text and photos by Elisa Leonelli
