The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Bambusa blumeana
Bambusa blumeana, spiny or thorny bamboo, is a clumping bamboo from tropical Asia with tall, slightly arched canes and thorny lower branches. It is grown mainly outdoors as an ornamental, windbreak or living fence, and its young shoots are eaten as a vegetable.
Bambusa spinosa, also known as B. blumeana, spiny bamboo or thorny bamboo, although in this respect it may be confused with Bambusa bambos, is a species of clumping bamboo occurring in Tropical Asia.
Where Bambusa blumeana originated is unclear, but it may have been native to Indonesia and Borneo. Its range now includes the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, southern China and Japan. It has also been introduced to Madagascar, Guam, and some other Indo-Pacific islands. Its natural habitat is hillsides, valley bottoms and stream banks, where it forms tangled thickets, at altitudes up to about 300 m (1,000 ft). It tolerates acid soils, clay and occasional flooding, but not saline soils.
Young shoots of Bambusa blumeana are boiled and eaten as a vegetable, being harvested when they first emerge from the ground. The plant is used as a living fence between fields, as a windbreak around homesteads and to prevent erosion on river banks. The poles are useful as a lightweight scaffolding but are not durable enough for building construction; other uses include basket-making, furniture manufacture, parquet, toys, chopsticks and kitchen utensils. The culms of this bamboo, along with those of Dendrocalamus asper, are the main source of bamboo pulp used to make paper.
Bambusa affinis · Bambusa albolineata · Bambusa amplexicaulis · Bambusa angustiaurita · Bambusa angustissima · Top End Bamboo · Bambusa aurinuda · Bambusa australis · Cape Bamboo · Thorny Bamboo · Bambusa barpatharica · Pin Bamboo
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Bambusa spinosa by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
