EXCLUSIVE I spent back-breaking days digging a bamboo nightmare out my garden... what my neighbour said after left me stunned

Daily Mail​

26-04-2025

When Jack Penton bought an allotment a couple of years ago, he was following a long-held ambition to tend to his very own garden.
Little did Mr Penton know that a bamboo screen - a selling point of the 65-square-metre plot - would lead to several months of back-breaking labour.
'I quite like my own space, so it was a selling point to me to have the bamboo there because it created a really good privacy screen,' Mr Penton explained.
'But there was no forewarning of the extent and the threat that bamboo can pose.'
Bamboo grows rapidly and is extremely strong, giving it the ability to punch through walls and turn over entire patios.
It can cost thousands to remove, forcing several landowners like 24-year-old Mr Penton to deal with the plant that is stronger than steel, themselves.
'It's all kind of congregated up against the fence into this massive wad of roots, so when you're pulling it out, it's like a full body workout it's really really heavy to get out,' he explained.
The five initial bamboos planted on his allotment spread their 10-ft-long roots underneath his plot and onto his neighbours land.
Mr Penton said: 'It extends out this really extensive root network and it just keeps popping up near her shed, but it's getting to the point where it keeps growing and could potentially cause structural damage because it can grow into all of the cracks.'
Bamboo is the fastest-growing plant on earth and spreads through underground stems called rhizomes.
The rhizomes are 'aggressive' and can form a colony, creating new shoots, sometimes meters away from the original plant.
Callum Hurst, director of C H Enviro, who specialise in invasive plant removal explained the plant's abilities are significantly more severe than its better-known counterpart, Japanese Knotweed.
'Once it matures it can put out running rhizomes and they can travel on average approximately up to 30 metres sometimes longer,' Mr Hurst explained.
Comparing the plant to Japanese Knotweed, he said: 'When you're dealing with bamboo rhizomes, it's a lot more aggressive and it's a lot more hardy and it can cause a lot more damage to concrete and it can manipulate those cracks a lot faster than Japanese knotweed.
'I've been dealing with Japanese Knotweed for about 13 years and there's only been a couple of cases where I've seen it cause structural damage.
'But with bamboo, it will tear up patios, it will break its way through waste pipes and damage underground services it can get into the footings of a building and the cavities it can start growing up in between the wall cavities.
'I've seen it spread from one garden to two properties down, it tore up the whole patio, the waste pipes and it spread all through the lawn, that was about 10 metres of spread.
'If it breaks and damages old clay waste pipes and you need all the drainage replaced it can get under shallow footings or the footings of a wall, you could be looking at tens of thousands just with the damage of the wall.'
Mr Penton knew hiring someone to remove the bamboo on his allotment would break the bank, so he spent £70 on a mattock and wrecking bar and removed the plants himself.
'I started on pulling on one of the roots and it must have gone about 10ft out from where it was originally growing,' he explained. 'I cut it all back, cut all the bamboo down to just under a ft high and I used a mattock to just chop straight through the roots.'
He cut back the vast amount of bamboo in January and finished the main bulk of the removal in April - physically digging out the bamboo.
Bamboo is removed by excavating the root ball from the ground and getting rid of every plant stem, including those that have been severed to prevent new shoots from emerging.
And on average costs between three and six thousand pounds per residential property to remove.
Mr Penton said: 'I've got some neighbours in the plot opposite and everytime I dig a clump out they're like "oo can we have that" and I'm like you can and then they explained to me what they were going to do with it and they were literally going to plant it seven ft from where I'd dug it out.
'So I wasn't best pleased about that but it's not banned from our allotment so there's nothing we can do to stop them from doing that.
'Aside from that as soon as I've been getting that out, knowing that my neighbours are replanting it, it's been going straight on the bonfire.'
Mr Hurst explained that the demand for bamboo removal has skyrocketed in the past couple of years.
He said: 'It typically takes up to ten years for a plant to really mature and then start to spread, so the overspill of bamboo enquiries that we're having now is from people who planted the bamboo sort of 10 to 15 years ago.
'It was advertised a lot on garden programmes on the TV sort of 10-15 years ago and recommended as a good screener for privacy.
'Alan Titchmarsh used to promote it a lot and various other celebrity gardeners used to say it was a really good asset to your garden.
'So it became really popular, a lot of people started planting it.
'But they didn't realise it's a nice plant on the mountains of Asia, but it's not well suited to a residential setting or to be planted near structures.'
Unfortunately, homeowners are preoccupied with Japanese knotweed, with 73 per cent of people believing it is more harmful than bamboo.
And although bamboo is not classified as an invasive species it is by far more intrusive and a growing issue in the UK.
So next time you take a trip to the garden centre, let this be a warning - stay well away from the bamboo.