Royal Oak Couple Battling Golden Bamboo Hopes to Warn Others of Invasive Species
(Mary Dupuis, June 25, 2023)
Royal Oak, MI – Katie Monaghan and her husband were taken by quite the surprise this April when their backyard was no longer a place for them to enjoy, but a haven for bamboo to flourish.
When the pair bought their Royal Oak home six months ago in October 2022, there was no sign of bamboo anywhere.
Come spring time, Monaghan couldn’t walk barefoot in her own backyard due to hundreds of sharp, nail-like bamboo canes coming up from the ground.
“I garden, so I was getting ready to build raised beds for my backyard and I stepped on something super super sharp and I kind of keeled over,” Monaghan said. “Then we found hundreds of them. And we realized each one was a baby bamboo cane popping up from an underground network of root ropes.”
Monaghan said the type of bamboo growing in their backyard is called golden bamboo. This type of running bamboo spreads from the mother plant underground via root ropes that are as thick as a finger and as hard as a rock.
“Imagine 50 Jump ropes eight inches underground in a zigzag pattern,” Monaghan said.
The root ropes in their backyard are currently 10-25 feet long and, if not removed properly, will spread by five to 10 feet per year. In order to remove them and stop the growth, the roots need to be excavated manually with shovels, spades, and even her dad’s crowbar.
“When you’re done spending a couple hours out there not only are you exhausted, sunburned, blistered and everything else, but you’re also covered in dirt from head to toe because you’re yanking up the roots,” Monaghan said.
Today, the tallest bamboo canes are above 20 feet high and grow about a foot per day. She said they can’t cut down the canes entirely because they need them in order to know where to dig up the roots.
When Monaghan tried to stop the growth in height by cutting a few feet off of the canes, it grew back anyways.
Monaghan said she has done extensive research and gotten advice from experts on how to get rid of the bamboo and found that poison does not work. If even an inch of the root is left behind, a new plant will grow.
The original bamboo plant was planted along the lot line in their neighbors’ backyard, however they’re unsure who planted it.
Monaghan said the previous owner of her home was from out of state, and when a lawn care company came to tend to the yard they would mow the tiny bamboo shoots, allowing them to continue spreading over the years until they were big and strong enough to grow into a problem.
She said other neighbors have told her they called the city when a bamboo forest started growing in the fall of 2022, and the previous owner of their home sent a service to chop it down shortly before Monaghan toured it.
Bamboo was not listed in any documents when she was purchasing the home.
Monaghan said while they know for certain their current neighbors had nothing to do with planting the bamboo, they’ve been very helpful and tried to aid in the removal process by excavating the mother plant from their yard. They had hoped that in removing the original plant, the rest of the plant may weaken or die.
To their dismay, removing the mother plant did not slow the bamboo in the least.
“You can’t just disconnect it from the mother plant because the root is the plant,” Monaghan said. “So as long as the roots are in the ground, the plant will keep throwing up bamboo canes every spring and fall, and so the solution is manual excavation of each root.”
The two have currently spent 80 hours digging up the roots, resulting in one broken shovel and barely a dent in the amount of bamboo left in the yard.
“80 hours is almost like a second job of digging up bamboo,” Monaghan said. “So we’re getting better at this very unique, awful skill of digging it up. I’m sure someday we’ll laugh at it but for right now, we work full time we’re getting our MBAs on the side.”
Since being planted, the bamboo spread and grew along and into the foundation of Monaghan’s house and then into their yard and under their concrete pad next to their driveway, which now has cracks in it where the roots have grown in.
In addition to this, the roots grew under their front porch, under their gas line and were woven into their chimney.
Monaghan said they were able to remove the bamboo from the foundation of their home and stop it three inches away from their garage foundation.
The two had installed an inflatable hot tub about a week before the sharp canes appeared, which they had to dig out to avoid it popping.
“It’s kind of hard to prioritize, because do you prioritize the inflatable hot tub, the concrete pad, the front, the foundation, inside the chimney, the gas line, or trying to put in new raised beds?” Monaghan said. “The more we dig, the more we find stuff.”
Monaghan said there’s currently a 10 foot by 10 foot patch in their yard that has about 100 canes growing very densely together. She said she read online that if it’s too hard to dig up an entire patch of it, it can be killed in a few years by letting the canes grow very tall, using all of their energy in their roots. Then, when the canes sprout leaves to gain back the energy, they should be cut down.
Monaghan said it may take two to three years of growing the patch and cutting it down, but they’re willing to use it as a backup plan.
In an attempt to receive some additional help with excavation, Monaghan said she found numerous bamboo removal websites for Michigan that would simply filter her information over to Angie’s List, leaving her with calls from companies who had never removed bamboo before.
Monaghan said she has reached out to Oakland County’s department for invasive species, but has not heard a response yet.
Golden bamboo is currently banned in the state of New York. According to The New York Times, this type of invasive bamboo is known as running bamboo because they grow uncontrollably and reach enormous heights.
Some places like Fairfax County, Virginia have put ordinances into place requiring that those who plant golden bamboo must see to it that the bamboo cannot spread to other properties. This can be done by installing a rhizome barrier made of a high-density metal or plastic around the bamboo when planting it.
Monaghan said she has been in contact with Brandon Kolo, the Royal Oak City Commissioner, who was worked to get her some contacts for making legislation in Michigan to stop the planting of golden bamboo, or at least keep it contained when planted. But for now the plant remains legal.
“All I want to see is a law that says, ‘Keep your bamboo in your yard,’” Monaghan said. “This is really terrible. We’ll get through it, but nobody should ever have to do this again. It would literally be easier to sell the house than to manually dig up the entire backyard to deal with this underground invasive species.”
