Bamboo Is Ruining My Life

Bamboo is a wonderful building material. Warm to the hand and warm to look at, and it ages without turning ugly. It bends into shapes that in steel would mean a fabricator, a budget and a very long conversation. Because it is a hollow tube it arrives with the structural section already solved, which is nature getting it right first time and not charging for the drawing. A roof built well in bamboo looks like it grew there rather than turned up on a lorry.

As a plant, it is a thug.

There is a clump of it just beyond the boundary of a house I'm working on. Somebody planted it along a wall. It has since grown into a courtyard.

The wall is on the neighbour's side, so none of this is mine to decide. A view is the one thing on a plan you cannot own. You can spend months settling a sightline against sun and prevailing wind and the approach, and it ends wherever the neighbour's planting decides. This one ends in a wall of somebody else's bamboo.

There are older photographs. It is in them, waist height, tidy, sitting neatly where it was put, and nobody in the frame is looking at it. Four years.

It goes in as a screen because it is fast and cheap and handsome, which is exactly why anyone plants it, and then it carries on doing the thing you bought it for long after you needed it done. Cutting it back is theatre. What anyone can do is walk round, be pleasant, explain themselves and hope.

Growing up in Britain, this argument was ambient. Somebody's conifers were too tall. Somebody's afternoon light was gone, or their hills were. The two households had stopped speaking some years earlier and were communicating through the fence line.

The tree was nearly always Leyland cypress. It began as an accident at Leighton Hall in Powys in 1888, a cross between two North American conifers whose home ranges lie hundreds of miles apart and which would never have met without a Welsh estate to introduce them. It grew like it had somewhere to be. It was sold as instant privacy and planted by the million by people who wanted to stop seeing their neighbours, and who then spent the next decade writing to them.

By 2003 the country had legislated. Part 8 of the Anti-social Behaviour Act, the high hedges law. Complaint forms, council officers, a right of appeal, the full apparatus of the state, brought to bear on a garden hedge.

It still wasn't enough for Val Horton. She spent twenty years in Bathampton, near Bath, trying to get a neighbour's fifty-foot leylandii taken down, because it had removed her view of Solsbury Hill. She had the Act. The Act did not help her, because the high hedges provisions cover loss of light and loss of access, and a view is neither of those things. In her late eighties she gave up. Everyone was completely exhausted by the fight, she said, and sometimes you have to admit defeat.

So the machine exists, and it would not have saved this house either. There is no right to a view. Not in Somerset, not in Bali. The thing the whole plan is arranged around has, legally speaking, no standing at all. What the house has instead is a boundary, a neighbour, and whether somebody is charming enough on a Tuesday afternoon.

Which leaves the uncomfortable part. The material I would choose over almost anything and the plant I want gone are the same organism. The whole difference between them is that somebody cut one down.

It's just bamboo. And now, suddenly, it's ruining my life.

The rest of the work, none of which is currently being held hostage by shrubbery, is at atropicalarchitect.com.

If something has quietly grown across your plans while you weren't watching, reply and tell me. I could use the company.

See you next week,
Danny