We spent a wonderful family afternoon with the mother of our local yarn store owner. She is a wonderful lady of 80 some odd years. Johann was on his best behavior (of course) and really helped out as we stripped out a 25–30 square foot section of “Noank Bamboo” from her gardens.
This bamboo shares many traits with real bamboo– invasive, sealed nodal growth, (mostly) upright single stem , propogates by root–but it is not a true bamboo that I can tell–it’s not as straight as most bamboo, not a woody grass, and the leaves are short wide oval shapes. People in Noank have had it there for quite a while but I haven’t seen it anywhere in Mystic or the surrounding areas (only 3 miles away.) Lore has it that the stuff arrived over a hundred years ago on one of the far east traders or whalers that operated out of Noank, or whose crew lived there at least. I’ll post a pic in a couple of days.