She moved to Georgia at 70 to grow a peculiar crop. At 85, she’s a guru.

Which has proved difficult, even though bamboo can shoot a couple feet higher or more in a single day, despite not technically being a tree.

She fell in love with the giant grass in the late 1970s. She was reading about organics and how bamboo was at once a food — its shoots are considered a vegetable — and also a building material, not to mention a carbon dioxide-guzzling evergreen. Its utility hooked her, its invasive image be damned.

“It’s a total ecological miracle,” she says. “Most plants can’t do all those things.”

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

She considers her farm in Pulaski County “an experiment station.” Some of the bamboo plants climb upward of 40 feet like chlorophyll cathedrals. On a wall inside her house, near the front door, she charts the growth of about a dozen varieties.

University of Georgia horticulturalists are familiar with Lewis’ efforts and plan to visit her bamboo grove in the spring.

But as quickly as bamboo can grow when it’s fed water, and as widely it sprouts in Asia, only a tiny fraction of U.S. commercial farmers have adopted it. So tiny that the Department of Agriculture does not tally the number of acres.

In Georgia, bamboo also has barely made a dent, unlike kudzu, which spread across the Southeast like wildfire after it was introduced from Japan more than a century ago.

Lewis understands it’s a tall task for bamboo to catch up to pine trees, already firmly rooted in Georgia soil when the British arrived. She imagines the seafarers saw the long, straight trunks and immediately thought, “Masts for ships!” Today pine trees supply the state’s giant timber industry, which turns them into housing and pulp and paper.

And yet here she is, living out her days in the heart of Georgia in a relentless shade of her own making.

Washington’s bamboo guru

Lewis lives in a mobile home with a manicured yard. She has a dog named Charlie and two goats, Cooper and Flashy.

She is lean and fit and seems like a reed of bamboo, herself, with her trim crop of hair.

She enjoys riding up her narrow gravel driveway as it bends though bamboo canopies. “I drive slow,” she says.

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

The path to her self-made, tiny forest in Middle Georgia has been a winding one.

Lewis grew up in an affluent Philadelphia suburb and went to Wellesley College near Boston where she met a Harvard-educated lawyer-to-be. Her 1962 wedding announcement earned three paragraphs in The New York Times. She and her husband, who later had three children, lived for a time in Virginia, Oregon and then Washington state. Her husband had become a successful lawyer, but she hadn’t been happy.

After her divorce in the late 1970s, she took courses at the University of Washington. “I threw myself into landscape architecture and I was in heaven,” she says.

She soon sold her services in that field, building gardens for clients and, before long, opening Bamboo Gardens, a Seattle-area nursery specializing in the plant.

In 1993, an article in a newspaper there mentioned her being, to some anyway, Washington’s bamboo guru. The article told of locals who’d become “hooked on bamboo” and how there are only a couple of bamboo varieties native to North America. It told how immigrants from Japan brought in most other kinds of bamboo. The write-up also described how at one time “U.S. scientists hoped to cultivate it as a cheap building material until dam-generated electricity made aluminum cheap to make.”

The article described Lewis as someone who “believes it is normal to fall for bamboo.”

‘Baseball cards for plant people’

In a small book that Lewis self-published in 2022, “Acres of Bamboo,” she acknowledged the varying opinions on bamboo. Some, as she put it, worry that bamboo will “run, ‘get out of control,’ and cause neighbors to fight each other.”

When she opened her nursery in Washington state, she figured plenty of others would appreciate bamboo as much as she did, because it was so sensible. But as Seattle grew, that was not the reason most folks sought her out. Instead they came seeking her wares as a botanical barrier.

“People bought bamboo because they didn’t want to see their neighbors,” Lewis recalls of customers bent on using the stuff to shield their views of other houses. Lewis’ shop had a poster that showed homes of various sizes and which kinds of bamboo grew tall enough to block sight of them.

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

She was such a bamboo true believer, she had an artist friend mock up a picture of the old Kingdome blanketed in bamboo.

“I would love to see bamboo on the roofs of cities,” Lewis says.

There exists a strain of “bamboo fever” among its small circle of aficionados. The main symptom? Just the sense that “I gotta have it. … I gotta have one of each kind of bamboo,” Lewis says.

Bamboo lovers seek out varieties they don’t have.

“It’s like any other fever,” Lewis says, considering a comparative allure. “Baseball cards for plant people.”

The agricultural sector, though, mostly has remained immune to bamboo’s pull.

Bodie Pennisi, a horticulturalist at UGA’s experiment station in Griffin, says the crop can grow successfully here, with timber bamboo yielding $5,000 per acre and bamboo shoots $2,000 to $5,000 per acre.

“One of the largest obstacles to large-scale bamboo adoption in the U.S. is the lack of commercial harvesting technology,” she added in an email.

Because bamboo grows very rapidly, it requires “labor-intensive harvesting of approximately 70% of the actively growing shoots twice weekly when harvested for food.”

In other words, part of the problem, at least at the moment, might be that it grows too fast.

Moving to Georgia

Lewis, undaunted, decided to move to Georgia in 2010 after attending a national meeting of the American Bamboo Society in Asheville.

She had wanted to start a bamboo farm and a man she met at the meeting offered to show her the ropes at a couple of bamboo groves he maintained south of Macon. She got most of her plants from him because they can take a decade to mature from seeds and she was, she says, “way too old to start from scratch.”

Financed by some savings and, later, an inheritance after her mother’s death, she bought her own place on the outskirts of Hawkinsville in Pulaski County. She cleared land and had trees chopped down in what had been a pecan grove. She figured that bamboo would grow well there and that there’d be enough summertime rain to bring the moisture bamboo requires.

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Lewis says her aim has never been to turn a profit, and she hasn’t.

Asked how much money has she sunk into her endeavor since she began planting here in spring 2014, Lewis thinks on it.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe $500 a week — forever.”

But, long after most people retire, let alone work in fields, she says she hasn’t strayed from her mission: “To introduce bamboo to American agriculture.”

Why?

She’ll remind you: Bamboo is an evergreen, it’s a wood and it’s food, for people and livestock.

‘Yours in bamboo’

Sometimes Lewis sips iced tea brewed with lemon and bamboo leaves. She’ll sign off in emails “yours in bamboo.”

She will tell you none of this was so much about going into business herself. Yes, she hoped to sell edible bamboo shoots to cooks and restaurants, and has done that, though spotty mail delivery has left some shipments rotten on arrival.

She is currently, with the help of a son, Doug, planting a type of bamboo known as Tonkin, whose poles are often used in stakes that nurseries use to brace young trees and other plants. That could bring in some money.

Still, she mostly aims to log her efforts and make notes and spread the gospel of bamboo.

Lewis can point to progress. Her research has identified four or five kinds of bamboo that thrive in her grove, a couple of them in small patches producing upward of 250 shoots for human consumption.

She also has learned that other parts of the bamboo are prime livestock feed. “Cattle go crazy to eat it,” she says.

In recent years, she owned a Guernsey steer named Big Boy that helped her haul stacks of cut bamboo on a sled.

Lewis has shared her learnings on her website, which also includes a quote from a grower: “Don’t wait to plant bamboo. Plant bamboo and wait.”

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

As for her farm, she knows she may need to invest more in irrigation. Summer rain here had been dependable enough up until a year or so back. “It’s so dry and hot these bamboos are not happy at all,” she says, gazing at a patch of 40-foot-tall bamboo.

She isn’t totally sure her growing operation has been a success. Some plants have struggled with disease. She’ll leave irrigation taps from an underground well running all night, but some plants haven’t responded.

Her grove has yet to mature and she’s still trying to learn.

On a walk through one patch of bamboo where some culms are by now supposed to be at least 5 inches in diameter, she points out that most are less than half that size. She taps on the sheaths of Moso bamboo, plinking out a hollow, plastic sound. “I’m doing something that’s not quite right,” Lewis says.

The man she met in Asheville back in 2010, Robby Russell, lives about half an hour up the road in Houston County. Russell, 68, has a small bamboo operation that mainly caters to customers by appointment. His bamboo groves are mature and he has been growing them for decades.

But when it comes to the prospect of tangling with the curiosities of bamboo, he has reached an uncomfortable conclusion: “You can’t know everything about it. … All of a sudden it’ll surprise you and do something totally different.”

Daphne Lewis’ legacy

The other day at Lewis’ farm, where a “Bamboo Farming USA” sign greets visitors, a couple of helpers she has enlisted arrived from Houston County to help dig holes.

One of the helpers, Kathy Waters, 74, learned of Lewis’ farm after her adult son became interested in bamboo about 10 years ago.

“When I tell people I work at the bamboo farm one day a week, they go, ‘What?’” Waters says.

She calls Lewis “a go-getter” and an honest soul.

Lewis, within earshot, says to Waters, jokingly, “Plant bamboo and you’ll get rich, Kathy. How about that? You believe me?”

Waters shakes her head and laughs.

Lewis’ other farm hand, Dave Hopper, is 81. He marvels at Lewis’ drive.

“She’s amazing,” he says. “The strength and vitality she has. I’m just down here trying to stay young.”

Lewis has wondered about the legacy of her place, of what will become of it when she dies. She’ll turn 86 in December.

She has asked her three children if they want it. They don’t, though lately son Doug has shown interest. So maybe she’ll deed the place to him.

But what will happen to her bamboo? If someone doesn’t ride herd on it the way she does with trenching and Roundup weed killer, the stuff will creep 8 feet a year in every direction.

“The smartest thing,” Lewis says, mostly joking, “is to cut it all down and burn it before it makes somebody mad.”

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC