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Since I had success last year with starting fargesia rufa from 1 culm+viable buds on the side, I decided to try doing it with a 1 shoot bud division and it was successful and growing just like a seedling. The shoot bud was only about 1 inch tall with roots on the bottom, but likely well primed since it was right before shooting season. This division was taken in early March and has now put out 3 shoots 3 1/2 months later so I think this has to be done in late winter for the cool weather and enough time to establish, but with this in mind, I can make a lot of fargesia divisions.

3 1/2 month old 1 shoot bud division



25% of a 1 culm division taken 1 year ago. This was so prolific that I split it up several times even after the initial division.

Steve -- what do you mean by a "shoot bud"? Are you saying that it had no established culms/leaves at all?

Exactly, There were no culms/foliage or anything except for the bud and some roots. It was literally a 3/4 inch long shoot bud ready to break soil with 2 little roots that came with it and this division turned out successful seeing the 3 shoots coming off of it which all look a bit bigger than the original culm.

I might need to try it on my grove of aureosulcata next year to see if this form of division works for runners which I doubt, but it's always worth a try.

I want one!

Here are some pictures of how this is done with as little plant material as possible, but it only seems to work on fargesias so far. With runners, I've had to encourage the rhizomes to make little whip shoots, then make those whips root out by keeping the area damp enough and then cut them off and they still require rooting gel to work, but with fargesia rufa, it is much simpler as shown here.

These are my 1 shoot bud divisions. I accidentally broke the root on the one on the left, but I'll see if it still manages to turn into a viable division. I hope this still works despite it being the 2nd shooting season for my rufas.


This is what I ended up with after 4-5 months of pampering.

I know that this is an old thread, but after a few years of dividing fargesias, I've found that 1 shoot bud divisions taken in early spring for fargesia rufa work most of the time as long as they have a root hair however the 1 culm divisions which have at least a shoot bud and some root mass taken by around September tend to take off a lot faster since they have plenty of energy to grow a bunch of shoot buds in preparation for shooting season in the following spring. I prefer using either juicy roots, or roots excelurator for propagation to speed up the process, but it seems like as long as the division is strong enough to produce new leaves, it is usually viable. When fargesias are small enough, they tend to behave like seedlings so they shoot pretty much all throughout the year until they reach around the 1ft mark.

This type of division also seems to be working on f nitida as well. I really don't see a need for TC on fargesias when they propagate this easily. Does anyone need any fargesia rufa divisions? I already have about a dozen pretty established in ground plantings so I can basically take hundreds of divisions for next spring if I needed to, perhaps in another 1-2 months.

Which Fargesia's have you tried this on? Just one species or more then one?

It has worked on both fargesia rufa and nitida, but I haven't touched any of my other clumpers yet.

Just wondering, has anyone else tried this on other fargesia forms and succeeded?

It hasn't worked on bambusas, and definitely not with phyllostachys, but when you are dealing with fargesia rufa, it's surprisingly effective despite having just the bare amount of plant material. It seems like they go into cell multiplication mode, or sort of like a stressed mode where survival shoots are produced when they are micro-propagated. I've tried culm propagation too on fargesias as well as layering, but even though it looks like it can be possible due to so many branches coming off each node, it hasn't worked for me yet.

I intend to try this out on some more fargesias next March.

On another note, my first batch of tree peony grafts do appear to be taking after a few days with a few failures as shown in this blog post.
http://stevespeonygarden.blogspot.com/2 ... onies.html

stevelau1911 wrote:Just wondering, has anyone else tried this on other fargesia forms and succeeded?

I haven't done this personally but I've seen a successful division off a bashania fargesii. (They are hard to propagate apparently)

It looked very strange as the rhizome had developed a large shoot bud but because of the division only a tiny culm was emerging from it.
I have no idea how long the rhizome section was underground from that division but I am guessing it would have had to have at least a few viable buds to prevent it becoming a living stick.
In any case this was a division from an emerging shoot and not just a sleeping bud on the rhizome.

No question Rufa is the easiest of the Fargesias. There are probably almost invisible buds on those small divisions.

When murieliae flowered here in 1999 we and a friend (with a nursery) divided the seedlings regularly but that was during the winter and long cool wet spring in a cool greenhouse, the window of opportunity otherwise is pretty small w/o such a g'house. Once we tried a tiny offset of Rufa when it first came out and it took, Rufa performs like a weed. In August the grocery stores were selling Green Panda for $5/2 gallon, In season $$15-$25.

Perfect divisions this year of F. demissia 'Gerry' and it looks like both are a bust. Seems they are a bust w/o a culm with leaves.

I decided to go ahead and split up one of the potted rufas again, but this time with 1 culm divisions that have a few shoot buds. Usually in early fall, they have enough time to generate some more shoot buds and put up some small shoots that fail to leaf out.

Rufa

Before


After


While I was at it, I did the same on the denudata and the nitida.

Denudata






Nitida



Here's just some of my herbaceous peony nurse roots that I haven't grafted yet outside to become a bit softer before I graft some tree peonies on.

Just to update, I did run out of the nurse roots on those peonies below which means I'll just need to dig more, but to get to the main topic, almost all of those fargesia divisions took.

I had to cut off the tops of a lot of the fargesia denudatas because they were simply too big and leafy in relation to their root mass, but that's a necessary sacrifice in order to get them to survive and root out with the remainder of the growing season. When a bamboo transpires all of its water due to not enough roots to supply the leaves, that can kill the division.

Denudata, quite a bit thinner. There wasn't that much root mass so I had no choice here.



Nitida, still curling due to full sun, but slowly recovering


Rufa: Here's an exception where I didn't top off any of the culms as this started out as a potted up plant and each section still had plenty of root mass. Rufa also tends to divide the easiest too.


I took apart another one of my rufas to get around 200 divisions, a few in each pot, and as expected, almost every one of them took well.



These are new from bamboo gardens so I sprayed them down with miticide and will get them into my quarantine greenhouse. I did see some signs of mites with the tents on the underside, but they didn't appear to be moving, nor did I see any of them outside their tents. Anyways, I just cleaned them up, divided them up a bit and will keep them closely monitored.

Steve - Seems awfully late to be dividing Fargesias with winter looming. We always did them in March.

One reason why I like dividing fargesias in the fall is because it seems to have a downsizing effect, or better yet a bud forming effect where more shoot buds can be produced in preparation for multiple shoots to come out the following year.

For example, I've seen a fargesia rufa 1 culm division produce over a dozen shoots in the spring when there only seemed to be 3 shoot buds attached, so some growth or multiplication of buds had to have happened.