Good questions carrie, there are good books but none online that i know of. since this is your first post it probably won't be your last. this is a great forum to get your answers. my black is small so i have no pruning involved. I'm fairly new to bamboo(second season) so i don't have the "woes" of making mine look good...i want mine to get to that point before i start pruning. a couple of suggestions: i have heard that people do prune the lower branches of black to expose the culms. They do come up green then turn black after a while. i'm not sure if it takes a full season to get them to turn black but anyway, as far as thinning them it is ok to thin out the older culms. As far as topping them? you might lose the characteristic of the plant but if she wants them topped well she is paying you.....others will chime in on that one...i have little experience with that one. there are a few people in here that have much more experience than i do. I'm sure they will voice there help. welcome to the forum.

Kurt

The reason that the thickest culms are green is they are the newest. Bamboo does not thicken from year to year like other trees. It is a grass. It comes up from shoot to full size in a month or two and then doesn't grow anymore. It also tends to get bigger from year to year until it is fully matured.

The culms that you top will never get any bigger but there will probably be new culms mext year that are as big or bigger than the ones you are topping, so this could be a yearly job for you.

Remove dead and damaged canes, remove lower branches.
Look closely how the lower branches come off in pairs and how they orient- you may only want to remove ones which grow across the field of view, not the ones that point towards or away from it.
Try to convince customer how badly topping the bamboo would look.
Open up the distance between the best canes.
You can make a forest of bamboo in a very small space with some attention to detail.
A rope completly around the grove will help with the flopping and the canes that touch the rope might be topped a foot or so above it without making a mess of it.
Perhaps explain to her that a general topping is irreversable and do the other things first and then decide.
It's her dime however.

if she insists on topping, cut the culms just above a node, to prevent water from pooling.

to avoid a too-even, unnatural top silhouette, try to leave the branches/leaves on the top nodes.

When cutting the culm, use a very sharp tool which cuts without breaking/cracking the lower section.

A tool that I've used on bamboo is a 4" angle grinder with a metal-cutting abrasive blade. Easy to control, the abrasion seems to provide an annealing/cauterizing action of the cut.
The high-speed blade doesn't bite into the bamboo like most any fine-toothed saw would.

All good advice.
For big culms a sharp limb lopper cuts pretty cleanly, and I use my Felco pruners for branch cutting.
Regarding the floppy ones, I'd assume that these are the oldest, smallest diameter culms. As black bamboo matures, it generally sends culms up fairly straight. So, you could cut these older culms out rather than tie them up. If you do decide to tie up some of the culms you can use transparent fishing line and loop a floppy one to a straight one; the transparent line is almost impossible to see.
None of what you've been asked to do will hurt the plant. It's pretty common to limb up to reveal nice culms. However, I agree that also topping this short of a bamboo will result in an unaesthetic effect. Try it on a few culms and see if she relents after she sees the result.

"blade" was a bad term for the angle grinder cutter.

It's a smooth-edged abrasive disk, without teeth or knife edge.

Any chance you'd be willing to send me some? Seriously!!
:-D
CJ

Thank you everyone!

I've gotten booted offline twice now, while trying to post this reply. Hope this works.

I'm going to the client's for the first time, not including the initial assessment visit, on Wednesday afternoon. I'll try to save any topping for last, in the hope that I can find an alternative/convince her that it is not a good idea. Since it is a new client, I'll try to wait as long as possible, establish relations, trust, etc. before trying to convice her that what she wants me to do is not a good idea.

Of course, she hired me bacause I'm a "professional" gardener. On the other hand, I've already admitted to her that I know nothing about bamboo.

CJ - I'll see what I can do about getting you (and me, and the garden center where I work that would just love to carry some...) black bamboo.

Thank you again, you've all been super helpful. Assuming I don't get fired on Wednesday, I'm certain I'll be back with more questions!

I have a bamboo (it's not black!) but could I ask, when pruning to stop branches falling into our pathway, should I cut them at ground level?

Thanks
ben

I have nearly the same question as Carrie, except that our Black Bamboo's still very young. When it grows much taller I'd like to remove the lower growth. Indeed I'm wondering whether it would be O.K. to do that now? Would it would set it back, or would it be better to wait till the entire plant's grown bigger?

Here are pictures showing how much it's bushed out since the spring.

Click here

For such a small plant trying to catch some in cloudly BC, I'd leave all the leaves in place, so they can contribute to building the root system to send up some bigger culms and generally increase the plant's robustness. When you get some large culms fully leaved out, then you could clean up the lower bits, which would then be a smaller %-age of the total leaves than now.

This is what I'm doing with som Ph. vivax, not yet 1 year in the ground, which is even more prostrate than yours. It was so floppy when I received it, I staked it. Right now, it's probably pushing rhizomes out from the planting point, and it needs all the energy it can get from all the leaves.

Unautre -

Thanks - you've confirmed what I suspected. I shall leave it alone until it gets a lot bigger

By the way, I'm happy to tell you that not all of B.C. is cloudy - here in the extreme SE corner, we get about 2,200 hours of sunshine a year - and that mostly in the warmer part of the year - i.e. April to September. Then things will grow quite fast so long as we keep them watered - our summers are very dry.

Herb

Got a question... Being new to the bamboo society, I'm starting black bamboo by cutting chunks of stalk (2-4ft tall) with root clumps attached. They were out of the ground with roots exposed for less than 1 hour before they were potted with quality mulch. I've kept them damp and shaded for 1 week.
The leaves on several stalks have wilted and dried from top to bottom.

How do I trim them?

What can I do to promote their well being?

THANKS!

HP in S. CA

Houzz user-

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