Bamboo is pretty dang cool. It has a wide variety of uses, from furniture to tools to food, and much more besides. It's basically a tree crossed with a plant. It grows extraordinarily quickly, and does so even in difficult conditions. (Indeed, for most people, the challenge is not with growing bamboo, but with keeping it contained.)

Given its incredible qualities, bamboo holds tremendous promise as an option for sustainability.

There are more than 1,400 species of bamboo, and while the heaviest concentration is found in Asia and Oceania, bamboo can also be found throughout North America, and grows effectively in any reasonably temperate and humid locale.

Clusters of bamboo are, in fact, typically a single plant, connected underground by a root system.

Plagiarizing from Britannica:

The seeds of some species are eaten as grain, and the cooked young shoots of some bamboos are eaten as vegetables, especially in Chinese cuisines. The raw leaves are a useful fodder for livestock. The pulped fibres of several bamboo species, especially Dendrocalamus strictus and Bambusa bambos, are used to make fine-quality paper. The jointed stems of bamboo have perhaps the most numerous uses; the largest stems supply planks for houses and rafts, while both large and small stems are lashed together to form the scaffoldings used on building-construction sites. The stems are also split up to make buckets and pipes or are used to make furniture, flooring, walking sticks, fishing poles, garden stakes, and other utensils. Some species of bamboo are used as ornamentals in landscape gardens. The fine-grained silica produced in the joints of bamboo stems has been used as a medicine in the Orient for centuries under the name tabasheer. East Asian artists, poets, and epicures have long celebrated the beauty and utility of bamboo in paintings and verse.

Thanks, Britannica.

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