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hello, i have a Bambusa Oldhamii that is about 4 years old, growing in my front yard. the newest culms are about six feet tall. we recently had a bad frost and most of the leaves and some of the culms turned brown and look dead. what should i do to help it recover? should i prune the dead leaves and culms?

i wouldnt trim or prune the dead parts yet. wait until spring when it begins to grow again so you can see what is really dead. by then most of the frost damaged leaves will probably have fallen off. I had one bamboo damaged in a bad freeze last winter and most of the leaes died a fell off. Some of the culms turned brown and died, but some that i thought were dead grew new leaves. In the spring the plant sent up new larger culms and seems to be healthy.

ok thanks. most of the leaves are gone now and some of the smaller culms are completely brown and some of the larger ones are still green. I will be checking it every day for new growth as soon as it warms up. I am planning to start some new plants from this one. can you recommend any books about bamboo?

I recommend Bamboo World by Victor Cusak. It is a very good all around resource for bamboo info.

My Bambusa oldhamii has sent up some new shoots! I cant tell how big they are going to be yet, but there are 3 new shoots peeking out. Some of the culms are brown and look dead but some culms are still green. All of last years leaves and limbs have fallen off and Im watching the green culms for new leaves. Last year each new shoot was larger and grew taller than the ones before. I hope these shoots are at least as big as last years, but I wont know for a few more days.

My bambusa oldhamii did almost the same thing last year except the first culms that came up in early spring were only about 4 feet tall, which was about a foot shorter than they were before. The new culms had a lot of leaves and after a few weeks a couple of much bigger culms started coming up which were about a foot taller than the ones from the previous year (which had all died due to frost). Each culm after that grew taller than the one before and the tallest ones from last year were about 8 ft tall. Some of these are still a bit green but most are dead. The new shoots coming up now seem small, so im thinking it may do the same as last year with a round of mutiple small shoots followed by rounds of a few larger culms getting larger each round.