Pleioblastus distichus 'Mini'

Pleioblastus distichus 'Mini' is the smallest of the running bamboos, a fine-textured dwarf that behaves more like a groundcover than a grove. The tiny, glossy leaves line up in flat, two-ranked sprays, fern-like and neat, on threadlike stems only eight or ten inches high, building a dense green carpet that can be mowed or edged like a lawn.

Despite the fern-like delicacy, this is a true bamboo, a member of the grass family from Japan, and the epithet distichus describes exactly that two-ranked leaf arrangement, while Pleioblastus means many shoots, for the several branches at each node. The Woodlanders start traces to the late Adam Turtle, the well-known bamboo grower of Our Bamboo Nursery in Summertown, Tennessee, who kept a famous collection and knew this plant as the most dwarf of the runners.

And a runner it is, which is the one thing to understand before planting. 'Mini' spreads by shallow underground rhizomes, and while the shallow roots make the bamboo genuinely controllable with an edger, a mowing, or a buried barrier, left alone in open ground the plant will travel. Treat that habit as the price of a superb groundcover: give the bamboo a bed with a firm edge, a strip between paving, a slope to knit together, or a container, and the running becomes an asset rather than a worry.

Grow 'Mini' in sun to part shade in almost any decent soil, hardy through USDA zones 6 to 9, and mow or shear the planting in late winter if hard cold has browned the foliage, so fresh green comes back clean in spring. Use the bamboo as a dense low groundcover and lawn alternative, for erosion control on a bank, among stepping stones, or in the quiet green geometry of a Japanese garden. Few plants make so tidy a carpet from so little height, as long as the gardener respects the run.