Giant and red pandas depend on bamboo for survival. So do billions of people in Asia, where bamboo forms an extraordinarily important part of everyday life. Bamboo shoots and seeds provide food for people, stems and leaves provide forage for live-stock. People fashion bamboo into hats, baskets, tools, toys, musical instruments, furniture, chopsticks, paper, and weapons. Bamboo stems are used to build houses, to make the tables and chairs that furnish the houses, and the fences that surround them.
Workers scale bamboo scaffolding to construct even the tallest buildings in Asia.
These flimsy-looking structures are actually models of resilience, merely swaying in typhoons that collapse steel frameworks. In botanical circles, debates rage over the bamboos. Even the seemingly simple question of how many species there are yields answers varying from more than 200 to 1,200. And no one can quite agree on what to call each of these species, however many there might be. In fact, bamboos, members of the grass family, are amazingly diverse and widespread plants.