I also wrote and posted a guide for how to build this and posted it on my site here with my tutorials. In this blog post I’ll feature more photos, and also lay out some personal context and history.
Emplaced into the natural line of drainage east of my grandmother’s home on the hilltop while she was very young, a farm pond was dug out of the clay soil and a retaining earth berm added by the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930’s. She says my great grandfather was a great advocate of the WPA, the New Deal, and FDR’s populism. The west side of the pond was nearer the house and popular for fishing bass, perch, and bullhead catfish. The far, east edge of the pond was messier to access through either the brush or the feeding watershed, so the the continued growth of the bamboo that had been planted there maybe around 2000 by my father evaded his attention until 2019 when I started working there as Grandma’s caregiver. At this point it was a massive and well watered stand, constrained only somewhat on the east end by the regular tilling of the upslope field by lease farmers and the regular glyphosate runoff that stunted its growth most at the field’s edge.
The bamboo when crowded or cut back would stunt and come up as a short grass but when sufficiently spaced it ranged in height from 12-18 feet tall. The taller, thicker canes were suitable for makeshift catfishing poles and carved flutes. The thinner canes had a nice flexibility. The flexibility waned as it aged or dried out, and it dried out much faster after cutting. Provided one acted within a few days could often use older or senescent canes that still had some green in them without too much snapping.
I started working the turf-like fallow garden in 2020 and then built the bamboo arch trellis in 2021. With the help of a Ryobi 18v disc cutter/ angle grinder and appropriate safety gear, The structure was made from nothing but the farm’s bamboo and natural fiber sisal baling twine from the shed, later on preferring jute baling twine. Tall enough to arch overhead such that one could walk underneath it to train up vines of cucumber, luffa gourd, tomato, peas, cowpeas, musk melons, watermelons, Apios americana groundnut, and passionfruit, and then harvest dangling produce from the comfort of the shade that grew up. The thin flexible canes bent and tied into in crisscrossed arches formed a diamond lattice that was fairly stable and that supported even heavy watermelon with a little help from twine hammocks crudely strung up in place from simple square knots like macrame to support their thin, fragile stems.
The material degraded quite a lot in the elements after two years, the third year limping along with the thin tops of the arch especially facing severe damage before being significantly dismantled the following winter. A small segment stayed up through the end of my work period in 2024.
I attempted twice to make a second arch but never fully completed either. They really are labor intensive, and only a subset of the canes of the variety the farm grew were thin and flexible enough, or fresh enough depending on the year’s winter kill.
