Bamboo

Common bamboo is a towering, woody grass that grows in open clumps. Its native range runs from Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka through Southeast Asia to the Yunnan province of southern China, and it is now the most widely planted bamboo across the tropics and subtropics. Its culms, or stems, rise ten to twenty metres; in the golden forms they are lemon-yellow with green stripes. It seldom flowers and sets no seed, spreading by its rhizomes and from cuttings instead. The culms are built into shelters, boats, furniture and flutes, and the young shoots are eaten cooked or pickled across Asia. Many Asian cultures held bamboo sacred. In China temple priests cast pieces or sticks of it to read omens, and the sticks later used for fortune telling were also called the Oracle of Kuan Yin; the Chinese burned it and kept it as a charm to repel evil spirits, a power the Tibetans and Indonesians credited it with too. In magic a wish or a pentagram is carved on a length of bamboo that is then buried or planted, a clump grown by the house brings luck to all inside, and a piece hung over the door is lucky because the wood keeps its colour. It is carried, grown or burned as powdered wood to break hexes, a bamboo flute is played to call good spirits, and divination tools are kept in a bamboo box.