Bamboo
| Bamboo | |
|---|---|
| |
| Bamboo forest at Huangshan, China | |
Scientific classification 
| |
| Kingdom: | Plantae |
| Clade: | Angiosperms |
| Clade: | Monocots |
| Clade: | Commelinids |
| Order: | Poales |
| Family: | Poaceae |
| Clade: | BOP clade |
| Subfamily: | Bambusoideae |
| Tribes | |
| Diversity | |
| >1,462 (known species) species in 115 genera | |
| Synonyms[1] | |
There are many varieties of bamboo but all are alike in that at most two parts are edible.
The only commonly eaten part is the young, tender shoots, which are sold as a canned vegetable. It's not uncommon to find fresh bamboo shoots either.
Much rarer is the dry fruit of the bamboo plant, because most varieties of bamboo do not flower or fruit for years or even many decades! Some bamboo forests exhibit "gregarious flowering" in which decades go by with no signs of bamboo sexual reproduction, but then one year the whole forest flowers and sets seed all together. Cultures tend to treat this as a disaster because the rodent population explodes following the sudden abundance of bamboo seeds and causes famines/plagues, but the bamboo seeds (sometimes called "bamboo rice") are also edible by humans.
References
- ↑ Soreng, Robert J.; Peterson, Paul M.; Romaschenko, Konstantin; Davidse, Gerrit; Zuloaga, Fernando O.; Judziewicz, Emmet J.; Filgueiras, Tarciso S.; Davis, Jerrold I.; Morrone, Osvaldo (2015). "A worldwide phylogenetic classification of the Poaceae (Gramineae)". Journal of Systematics and Evolution. 53 (2): 117–137. doi:10.1111/jse.12150. ISSN 1674-4918.
Acknowledgements
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Bamboo, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.