GRASSES CAN BE ORNAMENTAL

Roland McKee

GRASSES hold a prominent place as ornamentals and their value for this purpose is generally recognized. Any list of plants commonly used in home gardens and public parks will include a number of grass species. When set against ornamentals with large and showy flowers grasses afford a pleasing contrast. Although small and inconspicuous, the flowers of grasses are produced in abundance and, when massed in large plumose or gracefully drooping panicles, they are delightfully beautiful. Grasses are attractive, not only for their tiny flowers in graceful panicles, but also for the graceful display in clumps of upright leaves.

The large grasses lend themselves admirably for use in spacious parks or in large home lawns. The species of importance in this class are pampas-grass (Cortaderia selloana), Uvagrass (Gynerium sagittatum), and Chinese silvergrass (Miscanthus sinensis) usually known by the misnomer "eulalia."

The smaller grasses can be used everywhere in lawns and gardens as bedding plants, background plants, or for borders. The most important for such uses are West Indies pennisetum (Pennisetum setaceum), feathertop (P. villosum), weeping lovegrass (Eragrostis curvula), flarescale lovegrass (E. amabilis), Japanese lovegrass (E. tenella), big quakinggrass (Briza maxima), little quakinggrass (B. minor), and desmazeria (Desmazeria sicula).

Although the greatest use of grass ornamentals is for outdoor planting, their use for cut flowers is of importance. The flowering panicles of many grasses, when arranged in tall vases or low bowls, make a beautiful display.

The flowering panicles of a number of grasses can be dried and used through a long period of time. Among the grasses that can be used in this way are winter bent (Agrostis hiemalis), cloud bent (A. nebulosa), harestail (Lagurus ovatus), and the quaking grasses (Briza maxima, B. minor, and B. media).

THE AUTHOR--Roland McKee is an agronomist in the Bureau of Plant Industry, Soils, and Agricultural Engineering.

BAMBOOS FOR FARM AND HOME

F. A. McClure

THE BAMBOOS are set off from the more familiar grasses by certain technical characters, such as the woody stems and the petiolate, or stalked, leaf blades. They comprise a highly varied array of plants that range in size and habit from tiny dwarfs a few inches high to long and slender climbers and giants a foot in diameter and more than 100 feet tall. Among them are individual kinds with properties that suit them, in aggregate, to a thousand functions. Many of the uses, although of basic importance in the areas where industry remains largely in the handicraft stage, are looked upon in this mechanized world only as curiosities. Other uses have come closer to our everyday lives than most of us know.

The most successful of Thomas A. Edison's early incandescent electric lamps had for its light-giving element a carbonized filament of bamboo a slender, wirelike element made from a single fibrovasular bundle from an internode of a bamboo culm, or stem. Bamboo fibers were still used in carbon-filament lamps for special purposes as late as 1910.

Apparently we are not sure Edison used fibers from a species of bamboo growing wild in the jungle at an elevation of about 5,000 feet on the slopes of Volcan Chiriqui, Panama. I have collected botanical specimens and fibers from this bamboo, which is said by local witnesses to have been the source of some of Edison's experimental material. It is Chusquea pittieri Hackel, a plant that appears to the casual observer to be of little interest or technical promise.

There have been many changes since the carbon-filament lamp revolutionized illumination, but bamboo now promises to offer to the technical world another fundamental raw material, cellulose. That the bulk of China's vast paper requirements has been supplied, for hundreds of years, by hand-dipped bamboo pulp is common knowledge. It may be news to many, however, that paper is already being made by machine, on a commercial scale, from bamboo pulp in Trinidad, Siam, Burma, India, and France, as well as in China. The Forest Research Institute at Dehra Dun, India, publishes its annual reports on machine-made bamboo paper, which seems to me to be the equal of the best book paper made from wood pulp.

The promise of bamboo is great. This is in terms of yearly per-acre production of cellulose and of possible increase of digester capacity.

Estimates based on carefully documented records of the United States Forest Service indicate that plantations of slash pine managed on a 35-year rotation gave, at a time when most of the trees were under 20 years of age, an average annual yield of 1.13 tons of oven-dry, sulphate, kraft pulp per acre. Bambusa vulgaris, on the other hand, according to records of the Trinidad Paper Pulp Co., Ltd., mentioned by the general manager, C. T. B. Ezard, in an interview, has produced more than 4 tons of pure, dry, cellulose pulp a year on a 3-year cutting cycle, at St. Augustine, Trinidad. On a 4-year cutting cycle it produced up to 4.5 tons.

As for digester capacity, the capacity of a given digester, in terms of yield per charge, has been increased as much as 20 percent by using some species of bamboo instead of southern pine. This increase, with the use of bamboo, is due to the greater density and better loading properties of bamboo chips.

Only by actual experiment can we find whether existing wild stands of bamboo will meet the ultimate need. In any case, we cannot afford to ignore what has happened to our wild stands of pulp-producing forest trees. The great reservoirs of one species after another have been depleted to an alarming extent by the axe of the pulpwood gatherer, and it remains to be seen whether scientific management of the remnants will succeed in raising the production of pulpwood to levels at which our skyrocketing consumption of pulp can be supplied.

The rapidly mounting requirements of the rayon industry are now added to those of the paper industry. The combined consumption of pulpwood by the paper and rayon industries of the United States increased more than 60 percent in the past decade, according to statistics supplied by the Forest Service from 10,349,000 cords in 1937 to 17,816,000 cords in 1946.

For the rayon industry, also, certain bamboos have been found well suited by virtue of superior technical properties, including a high alpha-cellulose content. That the use of bamboo for cellulose is no longer in the experimental stage is suggested by the fact, as we find in Fibres, for March 1947, that a company has been organized in Travancore, India, for the commercial production of rayon from bamboo. Such use of bamboo may well be extended as the demand for rayon continues. Forest Resources of Chile, issued by the Forest Service, reported that "World production of rayon has been going up rapidly, from about 20 million pounds in 1912 to almost 2,000 million pounds in 1938."

Building upon the fundamental research carried out by William Raitt through many years of patient labor, our great paper research laboratories have been refining the methods and perfecting the techniques of using bamboo in the making of paper. Now it is possible on a commercial basis to make any desired quality of paper from a large number of different bamboos. Among the principal remaining problems are to find the best, most productive, and most easily harvested bamboos and to mechanize the processes of cutting and preparing them for the mill.

During the recent war, unseasoned, home-grown, bamboo culms sold at wholesale for as much as 25 cents a running foot. The acute shortage of bamboos suitable for our strategic needs, which developed soon after our supply from the Far East was cut off, emphasized the importance of establishing numerous plantings of superior bamboos in the Western Hemisphere. From these plantings, supplies adequate for our needs might be drawn should a similar emergency arise.

Through its program of technical collaboration with Latin American countries, the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations of the Department of Agriculture is fostering the development of such a reservoir of superior bamboo material.

As a part of the program of its Tropical Forest Experiment Station at Rio Piedras, P. R., the Forest Service is conducting extensive experimental plantings of several species of bamboo. Because of their excellent soil-binding properties and heavy mulch production, bamboo plantings are particularly appropriate for trial on wasteland too steep for cultivation. In the experiments at Rio Piedras, bamboos are being tested as a possible crop for such lands.

The Federal Agricultural Experiment Station at Mayaguez, P. R., experimenting with bamboos introduced from abroad, has brought to light a great deal of basic information concerning methods of propagation, seasoning, utilization, protection against the attacks of wood-eating insects, and so on.

The Forest Products Laboratory at Madison, Wis., has carried out preliminary studies on several species of bamboo. The studies include tests of strength, gluing tests, and impregnation for the modification of the physical properties of the culms and for protecting them against insects and fungi.

A large collection of living bamboos from abroad has been built up at the Barbour Lathrop Plant Introduction Garden, near Savannah, Ga., and at the Coconut Grove Garden, near Miami, Fla., by the Department of Agriculture through its Division of Plant Exploration and Introduction.

Uses on the Farm

Besides the commercial importance of products obtained from bamboo, its use as a supplementary crop and source of material for farm and home use is interesting. The development of bamboo for such uses has only just begun.

Propagation material of bamboos of excellent technical properties is available in the United States. They can be grown in a large part of the United States. Groves of bamboo on the farm can be useful as chicken runs and bird refuges. They can also supply edible shoots, supplemental winter forage for livestock, and poles for a hundred other uses: Tree props, poles for harvesting nuts and Spanish moss, fishing poles, fish-net handles, chicken fences, garden stakes, lining-out poles for fence building, and for staking off lands in plowing to name only a few.