We at Boxhill would like to explain the dying bamboo in front of the nursery.  Bamboo has a life cycle in which it dies, species by species, every 60 to 130 years and then regenerates itself from seed, all in a span of about 1 to 4 years, everywhere on earth.  They flower all at the same time, all over the world, irrespective of geographic location and climate, as long as they were derived from the same mother plant. Most bamboos are ‘divisions’ taken from the same mother plant at some point. These divisions were re-divided over time and shared across the world. Although the divisions are now geographically in different locations, they still carry the same genetic makeup. So when a bamboo plant in, say, North America flowers, the same plant in Asia will also flower at roughly the same time. It is as if the plants carry an an internal clock ticking away until the preset alarm goes off simultaneously. This mass flowering phenomenon is called gregarious flowering.  When the flowering is complete we will remove the dead plants and replace them with a somewhat smaller clumping variety, probably Fargesia robusta.