bamboo and bananas

Down here in the subtropics of New Orleans, we love to plant banana trees and we love to plant bamboo. There are red dwarf bananas, medium sized bananas and the huge ones that produce fruits you can pick and eat. Each and every one of them is invasive and you will soon have banana trees sprouting all over your yard and your neighbor's. If you plant bananas close enough to your pond, they will sprout up through your liner. I have seen them come up through 45 mil EPDM liner, so beware of bananas.

Bamboo comes in hundreds of different kinds and is beautiful. We love bamboo as much as we love banana trees. There are clumping and non clumping kinds of bamboo. Each is invasive. The difference is that the non clumping kinds will take a little longer to send a shoot up through your liner. And bamboo is much harder to get out of your yard, neighbors yard and for that matter, your neighborhood, than bananas. Bamboo is persistent and must be watched daily for new shoots and that's hard to do when the only way you can see a new shoot is when it has popped its little head through your brand new liner. The way to contain bamboo is to surround the plant with metal that is three feet deep and completely surrounds the root system. That's a mighty deep hole to dig.

So CAUTION! Do not plant either of these plants near your pond or you might be patching your liner.