I love this post! Thank you @ymfingsteadilyon for tagging me!
About the American bamboo, yes it's similar!—Arundinaria species grow as large clonal colonies. These colonies take time to establish, but once they reach a particular size, they start growing and expanding much faster, with the height of the canes beginning to exceed 15 ft. or more.
Arundinaria bamboos typically only produce seed once and die soon afterward. So yeah! They shoot up in a relatively short period of time, growing very very dense and nearly impenetrable thickets, and then they die—so the little seedlings produced by the flowering event will have enough light to live (we think).
The American bamboo is relevant in more than one way, actually, because broadly speaking, canebrakes are an extinct ecosystem. (But we can still bring them back, in some sense, so it's a little different.) Before colonization, there were canebrakes that stretched for miles, essentially forests of 30-40ft tall bamboo (I don't actually know how tall it got at maximum, it seems related to the overall size of the 'brake) and this was a huge component of the Southeastern USA ecosystem. When the land was colonized, almost all the canebrakes were destroyed, and it is thought that this is in fact part of the cause of the extinction of Carolina parakeets, Bachman's warblers, and passenger pigeons.
The plant was essentially a keystone species, and nowadays it is so little known, the only people really advocating for it right now are the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, for whom it's a fundamental part of their culture because in the past it was used for EVERYTHING. Arrows, blowguns, mats, baskets, backpacks, fish traps, frames and containers of all sorts, musical instruments, torches, you can even eat the seeds and the young shoots, this plant is everything. But it's so rare now that native artisans are having trouble finding canes big enough to work with.
You can still see rivercane nowadays, but it mostly grows in very small, scruffy, sad-looking patches in ditches and the like, and struggles to clear 10ft in height. It sometimes also establishes little thickets in the undergrowth of forests, but without controlled burning, it can't do well.
Canebrakes are a fire-dependent ecosystem, they thrive with human caretakers. I THINK there are a couple contiguous acres of canebrake extant in Alabama and South Georgia, but I met with a guy who has devoted his life's career to studying the stuff, and he told me the largest canebrake he'd ever seen was around 200x500 feet. FEET.
this ecosystem is so rare people who study it can't even FIND an extant example bigger than a large backyard, and it's not protected and barely anybody knows what it is.
I was 22 when I learned that Kentucky not only had a native bamboo species, but also is possibly NAMED AFTER BAMBOO (Kain-tuck, "kain" as in cane), and long story short I was so fucked up over this information that I couldn't do anything except decide to devote my entire career to studying it.
hi, im getting a degree in plants now
by the way, Kentucky gets even weirder, because the Bluegrass Region used to be what is known as an oak savanna. Basically, an open savanna environment full of wildflowers with giant fuckoff huge oak trees forming 10-50% canopy coverage. And between the oak trees, a lot of the open areas were full of bamboo. There was straight up nothing else like this on Earth.
You can still see a few of the oak trees. If you are driving in the Lexington area and you see an oak tree that is so goddamn BIG you want to pull over on the side of the road and take pictures of it? That's a pre-colonization oak tree. You're welcome.
Kentucky bluegrass, by the way, is not native to Kentucky. None of the low-growing turfgrasses people use in lawns are. The ground would have been covered in tons of clover, which supposedly reached as high as horses' knees. (There are like, 3 Trifolium species we know about that would have been among the native clover, and they're all endangered to critically endangered, because killing the Bison and their caretakers, the native peoples, fucked them over so bad.)
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