Woman compelled to pay £1,250 to a ‘man with a digger’ to clear bamboo

Years ago, I visited a French village on holiday. On my daily walks, I loved to peer through the railings of a charming Art Nouveau house which appeared to be abandoned. 

Through the thicket of three-metre-high bamboo that filled the front garden, I could just about see the crumbling stone steps that led up to heavy wooden doors and the house’s pretty, green balconies and shutters. I christened it the Sleeping Beauty house.

Little did I know that ten years later, I’d pick up the keys to that Sleeping Beauty and the bamboo forest would cease to be so enchanting.

In that first week, I patted myself on the back for being an extremely competent adult, having navigated my way through the notoriously complicated French bureaucracy involved in buying a house and establishing residency, then moving all of our possessions, our dogs and cat 1,000km from London to the South of France. 

Of course, there were renovations to do but also surely there would be plenty of time for rosé and wandering about the market with a straw basket over my arm, like the cosplaying French housewife I aspired to be?

I realised one of the first things I’d have to do was hack a path through the bamboo so the removal men to get our furniture into the house. The lorry was arriving in a week. That gave me plenty of time to tackle the bamboo.

What an idiot. On the first day, I went at the bamboo with a pair of slightly blunt loppers, cutting it as close to the ground as I could. I was hot, sweaty, dirty. I kept tripping over the gnarled roots which poked unevenly out of the ground. Juliette Binoche never suffered like this. 

Clearly, these were the perfect circumstances in which to introduce myself to new neighbours, who stopped to say hello or simply to stare at the foolish woman who had bought this ridiculous house.

At one point, having constructed a heap of cut bamboo higher than my head, I paused for a glass of water and ended up in conversation with an elderly man. 

He needed some bamboo, did I think he might have some? Have some? Monsieur, be my guest, bring a trailer. He said he would come back tomorrow, which he did, and there I still was, like an extra from Tenko with my blunt loppers and weary attitude. 

I should have known when he brought out his tape measure. Yes, he thought. He might be able to take 50, or even 60cm off my hands. At this point I was considering how possible it might be to acquire a panda.

It took me days to get rid of enough of the devil’s shoot for the removal men to navigate their way to the front steps. The chopping and digging cut up my hands and severely cut into my rosé-and-straw-basket time, and I hadn’t even cleared a tenth of our not-very-big garden. 

In the end, in a moment of supreme un-self-reliance that I’m sure would disappoint Dick and Angel of Escape to the Château, I decided to throw a cheque at it – because cheques are still a thing in France – and gave a man with a digger €1,500 (about £1,250) to get rid of the wretched stuff, along with the top layer of soil because any malign bit of stray root left behind can burst into life and eventually leave you back where you started.

When last week the news was full of stories of bamboo that had wrecked people’s gardens and even crept into their houses, forcing up floorboards, growing between walls and even, in one case, colonising an oven, costing tens of thousands of pounds to tackle, it brought all the misery back. 

I was, to use the modern argot, triggered. I posted on X: ‘Do not, and I cannot emphasise this enough, plant bamboo. It’s a b*****d.’ 

People replied with their own tales of woe, one friend sharing, ‘I overheard my neighbour saying “That’s where the bamboo is going” (right next to my fence). Have been wondering how to handle this without falling out.’ 

My eyes nearly popped out of my head. Don’t worry about falling out, save yourselves!

I blame those first garden makeover shows of the 90s. Despite the fact that the closest most of us got to vegetation was the mint we put in our mojitos, all of my girlfriends tuned in to horticultural hottie, Diarmuid Gavin, as he talked about creating garden rooms and planting bamboo along fence lines to create natural screens. 

All of that foolishness has come home to roost, or to root, as the wretched stuff clambers through neighbourhoods with all the finesse of a boozed-up bunch of football hooligans. 

I see people picking up pots of this particular evil in garden centres and it’s all I can do not to rip it out of their hands.

Yes, yes, I know, there are less invasive varieties of bamboo, you can plant it sunk into the ground in pots, you can dig trenches around the roots, and so on. It sounds about as restful as preparing for a siege. But then – even if you put yourself through all of this – what do you get? 

Many varieties are so depressingly scruffy they make you pray for the elegant restraint of Japanese Knotweed.

Last night, I was talking to a neighbour about gardening and he asked, ‘Have you been to La Bambouseraie in the Cévennes?’ He might as well have suggested an spider museum to an arachnophobe. 

This 34-hectare site, only a worrying 100km from us, is home to 1,000 varieties of bamboo. 

Too much, too soon, and I’d be terrified a particularly sinister and invasive specimen would conceal itself in my pocket in a plan to establish itself in my garden. I put nothing past them. You have been warned.