were they ten culms all in one root ball?

The general recommendation is that a Ph. transpant should have at least 2 culms in a rootball with the connecting rhizomes intact.

If you have 10 individual culms and rootballs, you may be in trouble.

I transplanted a 2-culm rootball in Dec 04. The leaves stayed green on the 10-foot tall culms. The transplant put up a few small culms last spring, and this spring is putting up 10 - 15 culms clumped close to the original rootball.

Your zone 6 could be part of the problem- particularly for an aurea not completely established.

When you say "kept it wet" hopefully you mean regular moisture. Some people seem to think of bamboo as a marginal pond plant, but its not.

Don't remove any part of the plant that is still green. You can fiddle with dead leaves if you want, but it probably won't make a difference. The dead leaves will probably take care of themselves, but your best bet will probably be the emergence of new culms. If you don't get new culms or at least flushes of new growth on the old culms this spring, you probably won't have much hope.

Good luck with this. I'd like to think Aurea can do well in zone 6 as I recently bought five 'Koi' plants.

I'm going to take pics & post them. I id'd it myself as this breed but I could be entirely wrong as I'm a newbie.
It came from a huge area 20+ ft tall growing behind a 200 here old barn here in zone 6 so I don't think the weather will affect it, I'm not sure if I moved it at the wrong time of year. As for the wet factor, we watered it almost daily because it was very dry here at the time we planted it. I was not aware that it needed to be in clumps, it wasn't very clumpy where it came from.
thanks for the input, I'll be back w/pics

I'm back with pics-my 12 year old took them so they are not the greatest.
You can see though how some of the plants are very green & others seem yellow. All of the leaves are brown & dry.
Should I remove the leaves & what can I do to encourage new growth this season?
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looks like you have a bunch of individuals culms, rather than the recommend 2-culms minimum per root ball. if the rhizome per culm is very short, the foliage isn't getting enough moisture, and has died. The culms will stay green longer, but will probably brown and die, too.

If you can go back and get rootballs of about 1 ft in diameter that have at least 2 culms per root ball. keep the dirt of the rootball intact, eg, wrapped in a plastic sac, and plant asap.

I would just wait for the nature to come back, to take its course. The root balls are most important, they must have enough critical mass to produce new culms and support new leaves on old culms.

I was in similar situation few weeks ago (zone 7/8).
Now, almost all transplants (Ph. aureosulcata) have new culms. The only plant that still does not have any new shoots is the one that had all the leaves left on when transplanted.
This bamboo actually looked the best for a few weeks after being moved to a new place (Feb 2006), however, eventually all the leaves died. Now the plant looks pretty promising again with new, healthy, bright green leaves all over the plant. I have not removed old blackish leaves, I assume they will drop off once its time for them to go. The mystery is why one of the strongest originally plant does not produce any new culms (yet), but at least it survived.

Btw, all the plants, with one exception, were teamed up as
root ball+1 culm, some of the culms were broken off and had no leaves when dug out (broken off culms fit better into a car), some of them had leaves removed accidently by helpers ;)

I also planted two relatively short broken off pieces (10-15") of root only (rhizome), so far nothing growing from them.
One thing that I have also noticed is that the root balls that were put a little bit deeper and covered with some extra 1"-2" layer of dirt, produced new culms the latest.

For a newbie like myself, so far preliminary observation:
root ball/mass is very important,
leaves and culms eventually will grow as long as roots are ok, and big enough.