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Concept
Bamboo
Summary
Bamboos are a diverse group of mostly evergreen perennial flowering plants making up the subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family, in the case of Dendrocalamus sinicus individual culms reaching a length of 46 meters, up to 36 centimeters in thickness and a weight of up to 450 kilograms. The internodes of bamboos can also be of great length. Kinabaluchloa wrayi has internodes up to 2.5 meters in length. and Arthrostylidium schombergkii with lower internodes up to 5 meters in length, exceeded in length only by papyrus. By contrast, the culms of the tiny bamboo Raddiella vanessiae of the Kaieteur Plateau in French Guiana are only 10–20 millimeters in length by about two millimeters in width. The origin of the word "bamboo" is uncertain, but it probably comes from the Dutch or Portuguese language, which originally borrowed it from Malay or Kannada.
In bamboo, as in other grasses, the internodal regions of the stem are usually hollow and the vascular bundles in the cross-section are scattered throughout the walls of the culm instead of in a cylindrical cambium layer between the bark (phloem) and the wood (xylem) as in dicots and conifers. The dicotyledonous woody xylem is also absent. The absence of secondary growth wood causes the stems of monocots, including the palms and large bamboos, to be columnar rather than tapering.
Bamboos include some of the fastest-growing plants in the world, due to a unique rhizome-dependent system. Certain species of bamboo can grow within a 24-hour period, at a rate of almost an hour (equivalent to 1 mm every 90 seconds). Growth up to 47.6 inches (156 centimeters) in 24 hours has been observed in the instance of Japanese giant timber bamboo (Phyllostachys bambusoides). This rapid growth and tolerance for marginal land, make bamboo a good candidate for afforestation, carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation.
Official source
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