Steve at Victoria Bamboo was very informative, helpful, and accommodating. He was not too keen, however, on organizing cross-country shipping. So instead I had Steve deliver the three plants to my friend who lives near his nursery. She was more amenable to arranging the shipping (so I thought).
One of the plants I got from Steve was a P. Kwangsiensis. Steve is likely the only retail source of this variety in Canada. When the plant arrived at my friend's house, it was in good shape, which she confirmed with iPhone pictures. She promised to ship me the plants "by the end of the week". Not quite. Six weeks later, I got the plants. She warned me, however, that one of them "looked like a goner". When it arrived, the P. Kwangsiensis looked like it had been left to bake in the sun with no water for about...six weeks. It was about 75% defoliated, with a few culms already greyish yellow.
I thought to myself, this is too rare a variety to simply throw away. I decided to re-pot it using a compost and triple-mix blend. I then lightly fertilized it with a lawn fertilizer on two occasions before November. It didn't perk up. In fact, it looked like it was getting worse. After moving it into the house recently (to protect it from the severe cold, even in the garage), it looked so bad that I had pretty much lost all hope for it:
I decided to make one last attempt at saving this bundle of sticks that used to be a beautiful, rare variety of bamboo. I started spraying it daily with a weak liquid kelp/distilled water mixture.
Today, after doing this for only about a week, I saw a few glimmers of hope. The first, an emerging shoot, I had actually noticed soon after bringing the pot into the house:
Today, however, I also noticed two emerging leaves. Here's one of them, emerging from a healthy-looking green culm:
The plant has a long way to go before it becomes "stable", but it looks like with a lot of care and a little luck it might get there.
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