Whence
Lucky bamboo
Plant

Where does Lucky bamboo come from?

Lucky bamboo comes from the rainforests of Central Africa, from Cameroon to the Congo. Despite its name it is not a bamboo, and despite nicknames like 'Chinese water bamboo' it is not from China: it is a dracaena, a member of the asparagus family.

A dracaena of the rainforest

Dracaena sanderiana grows wild in Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola, according to Kew's World Checklist of Vascular Plants. It is a perennial about a metre tall, with slightly twisted grey-green leaves some 23 cm long and clusters of small white flowers. It likes bright, filtered light, like the light under a rainforest canopy; direct sun scorches its leaves.

Not a bamboo at all

Its stem looks like a bamboo cane, but it is fleshy, and the plant belongs to an entirely different order from true bamboos; the two share only the broad group of monocots. Indoors it stays compact and grows upwards, keeping its bamboo look, but planted in the ground it loses it and fills out like other dragon trees. Growers train the stems into braids and spirals, and new plants grow from cuttings taken just above a node, one of the rings on the stem.

Why people say China

Several of its trade names sound Chinese, such as Chinese water bamboo, and it is also sold as friendship bamboo, curly bamboo and even Belgian evergreen. Yet neither China nor Belgium is its home. Its scientific name honours Henry Frederick Conrad Sander (1847–1920), a German-born nurseryman and orchid grower who settled in St Albans, England. The plant itself is African, from the forests between Cameroon and the Congo basin.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Dracaena sanderiana ↗ · plants.ces.ncsu.edu ↗ · gbif.org ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Henry Frederick Conrad Sander ↗

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