Aggravated bamboo! - Maree

Soil . . . scoop up a handful of the magic stuff. Look at it closely. What wonders it holds as it lies there in your palm. Tiny sharp grains of sand, little faggots of wood and leaf fiber, infinitely small round pieces of marble, fragments of shell, specks of black carbon, a section of vertebrae from some minute creature. And mingling with it all the dust of countless generations of plants and flowers, trees, animals and – yes – our own, age-long forgotten forebears, gardeners of long ago. Can this incredible composition be the common soil?
- Stuart Maddox Masters, The Seasons Through



A bit of Bamboo growing in the one corner of my pond area - I DID make a concerted effort to remove it all, after it almost cracked my pond in half, but here it is, back again after our Spring rains! When removing this, as you dig, you see runners going in all directions under-ground, and it's not good enough to just chop them off and remove the main plant, because shortly there are sprouts everywhere! It's as if the digging and chopping actually aggravates and activates them!