My husband is going down tomorrow to pick up orders from Carolina Orchids and Orchid View. If you are interested in purchases, ask the vendors. Most will be happy to tell you if the plant is suitable for your growing conditions. The owner of Carolina Orchids is Tom Nasser and he offers outstanding plants. Most are huge divisions and they are very well grown. He specializes in phrags, paphs, bulbos and many, many species. Orchid View is HP and Katherine Norton. They are renowned phal and phrag breeders but he is best known for his blue phals. A couple of their com pots and some of their blue seedlings will live at my house now. Have fun at the show, take a camera and bring home lots of goodies. Brooke

For long screens like 60ft, an aggressive running type would be able to fill it in within 3-4 years only with 1 plant since rhizomes can run like crazy when they're traveling along a rhizome barrier and well fertilized, but it is a pain to put down such a huge rhizome barrier since a 60ft circle is almost like a week of digging. You could also just rhizome prune annually, but 60ft might still take a couple hours to go around the whole thing. You might want one of the fargesia or chusquea clumping species for this purpose and plant them about 6ft apart. You could even have multiple plantings since their canopies will fan out to fill in the gaps. Clumpers will grow a lot less aggressive than running types and be easier to maintain since new shoots will only appear a few inches a way each year as opposed to several feet. Bamboos also rarely ever go to seed.

I live in eastern NC and is desperately seeking anyone near the Greenville area who have these giant bamboo plants on their property and is willing to sell me a rhizome or plants. Any hardy bamboo would be great. I am looking to buy :)

The poles aren't as strong as you might think (native cane). The plants are very sensitive to the occasional droughts. I had a good stand behind my back yard in a forest and during the drought they died off . Later I found it growing in a low spot that normally floods. Ground water is going to be the key issue and rain runoff ditches are probably the best site for establishing a stand. Still, they spread underground and re-establish where there is adequate and continuous moisture so I have no idea how you would contain them. I don't find them attractive at all. A summertime short visual barrier if there's enough moisture but the rest of the year and in dry periods they do look ratty and the dead,dying leaves do persist. Are you trying to hide a view? As I mentioned, they aren't a permanent barrier. In the riverine (drainage/creek overflow) forest they would pop up in a different location every few years.