For neither love nor money can you rent a panda in north London and I need one. A big roly-poly hungry one who wants a few hours away from the pressure to reproduce, to mow down my bamboo.
Bamboo is gardening’s prettiest problem. An invasive, pernicious, difficult to tame, selfish plant that I’ve now discovered in the garden at my new flat.
For the lazy gardener, I can see the appeal. It has an impressive growth rate — the quickest can clock up 90cm a day — to quickly fill a gap. Its fresh-looking green trunks liven up bare walls or crumbly fences. The leaves are luscious and bushy.
It’s technically a grass although the kind that diversifies into a forest, makes mincemeat of concrete, busts walls, scurries under decking and spreads metres and metres from where you originally put it. Turning your life into a super-slow whack-a-mole adventure.
So it must die. Hence the panda.
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I don’t even have the stylish ornamental kind. The varieties on which hundreds of pounds can be frittered. So it is time to call in the contractors (Mum and Dad). The retired love a challenge.
They sawed the absolute worst of it down; a 3m-long flower bed, dense with the stuff, which then extended under the mouldy decking and sprouted up 2m high on the other side of the garden. Poison was doused on the remaining sprouts and shoots.
Then Mum and Dad tired, and it was almost the end of the working week (Wednesday), so off they went home to drink rosé wine and I was left with bundles and bundles of bamboo — enough to build a second bedroom — to ferry to the dump in a Ford Fiesta Zetec.
Again, and I don’t want to labour the point, but the panda would have seen to this in minutes.
Nic Seal, the managing director of Environet, the removal expert, chuckles when I explain the situation. Bamboo is “unwise”, “common” and can race “30ft or more” in an English garden. Even the clumping kind has running shoes.
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He tells me of one client’s home where it has “grown underneath a property that’s 20 years old, and in four places it’s coming through the floor. Basically you’ve got a bamboo plant in the kitchen, in the sitting room in the hall and the study.
“The damage bamboo can cause is on a par, if not greater than, the feared Japanese knotweed. It spreads further and quicker.” The saving grace is it is easier to dig out.
Which brings me back to the Fiesta full of bamboo logs. Was chopping it and poisoning it a waste of time?
Not entirely. Herbicide is no good, but a regular cull will “starve it of leaves for photosynthesis and you’ll exhaust the plant eventually”, Seal says. “You might be at it for 20 years, though.” Hardly ideal.
“If anyone is serious, it needs hard graft and digging. Dig out the big root ball, the heart of it and get all the runners out of the ground.”
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Because even if you can’t be arsed, you neighbours might be. Seal reports “lots of legal cases where the adjoining owner feels aggrieved” after the bamboo has spread. “Nuisance court cases” are being brought by owners two houses down in some cases.
Thankfully I’m nowhere near that. The chopping has put the villain on pause, so I’ve pencilled in a full dig for “after summer”. Next summer, if it’s back, you’ll find me at Edinburgh Zoo with a cage, stun gun and bamboo taster tray shouting: “Tian Tian, Tian Tian!”
Luke Jones presents Breakfast on Times Radio; @lukejones03
