Are There Wild Bamboos in Mexico?

Bamboos, unlike other grasses, mostly live in association with forests. Two different types of bamboos are recognized: the thick, hard “woody” bamboos, reaching up to 40 m tall, and the softer-stemmed “herbaceous” bamboos, rarely reaching more than 1 m tall. Worldwide, over 1,650 bamboo species are known, and although many people think of bamboos as Asian, 530 species (about one-third of total bamboo diversity) are native to the Western hemisphere. With the exception of Canada, every country in the Americas has a least one bamboo species—even the USA has three. In this article, we will focus on the Mexican bamboo species. Mexico has 56 of the 530 bamboo species, of which 52 are woody bamboos and 4 are herbaceous bamboos. A total of 24 Mexican bamboo species live in the cloud forest, so this type of vegetation is very important for the bamboos of Mexico. Among those 56 species, 36 are found only in Mexico, which means they are endemic. Native bamboos in Mexico were used long before Spanish conquerors arrived and are still used today.