hayu..hayu.. tanem bambu.. udara bersih, burung-burung juga mampir :D
Cracking the code to 'the perfect plant' opens a path to saving the planet
By Paula Bock
If Jackie Heinricher's Chilean feather bamboo hadn't flowered in her
Skagit County garden 10 years ago, we might, this very moment, be
snacking on the latest, greatest gourmet craze: crunchy chips made
from bamboo shoots.
But flower it did, a once-in-a-century phenomenon. All over the world,
from Argentina to Alameda to Anacortes, every clump of Chusquea culeou
unfurled fairy-like fans of pointy mauve petals and dancing chartreuse
pods. Inside the pods nestled tiny seeds that Heinricher carefully
stripped off by hand and germinated with the help of a local
tissue-culture lab. It was a horticultural feat that eventually left
Heinricher with 10,000 baby bamboos.
Even more significant? The ideas sprouting in Heinricher's head —
ideas that blossomed into a bamboo empire beyond gardens. Four years
ago, Heinricher and tissue-culture expert Randy Burr discovered how to
clone bamboo in a test tube after years of arduous experimentation.
Now, Heinricher's multimillion-dollar high-tech company, Boo-Shoot
Gardens in Mount Vernon, produces more than 2 million plants a year
and has launched a "Plant-a-Boo" crusade to curb global warming.
Heard of the United Nations program to plant a billion trees for the
planet? Bamboo sequesters carbon dioxide at far higher rates than an
equivalent stand of trees and releases up to three times the amount of
oxygen.
Saving the planet wasn't on Heinricher's radar when she cleared
pasture in Anacortes and planted her first stand. She'd worked as a
marine scientist, Army nurse, professional scuba diver, ski bum,
whale-watch tour guide — but nothing quite like this. Her business
plan hadn't yet gelled, but she knew bamboo had fabulous qualities and
she loved it.
"The idea that bamboo could have a meaning or a purpose above and
beyond horticulture? You can't even entertain those thoughts without
the ability to pump out millions of plants. It took eight full years
to bring the technology to fruition."
While Heinricher and Burr were tinkering in the lab, consumers
developed a craving for bamboo floors, bamboo towels, bamboo trays for
bamboo plates. And the world started worrying about climate change.
Not only do the hairy plants capture carbon, they "collect dust and
dirt out of the air and make the rain fall more gently on the ground,"
says Gib Cooper, a nurseryman in Gold Beach, Ore., and executive
director of Bamboo of the Americas, a conservation-action
organization. "I hate to say it: The world's population and economy
are going to outpace whatever we try to do. But bamboo will help."
"I feel like the company's at the epicenter of a big place and time,"
says 48-year-old Heinricher. "This is a collision of breakthrough
technology, a demand for bamboo products and global warming. I didn't
have the brilliant foresight to see it, but it's pretty common in
business that where you wind up is not where you thought you'd be."
TO HEINRICHER, bamboo is the perfect plant.
Thomas Edison used carbonized bamboo filament in his first light bulb;
Alexander Graham Bell created his first phonograph needle from a
bamboo sliver. With tensile strength up to 52,000 pounds per square
inch, bamboo is stronger than most steel, yet its fibers can be spun
into a silky cloth blessed by natural antimicrobials.
Since antiquity, bamboo has been cooked as food and crafted into
chopsticks, houses, boats, furniture, scaffolding, farm tools, medical
instruments and art. It's been gulped as an aphrodisiac and swallowed
as a treatment for asthma, kidney failure, venereal disease and cancer.
Unlike cotton, bamboo doesn't require pesticides to flourish. It needs
modest amounts of water to thrive — some species rise a foot a day
during growing season — and its root system can help stabilize
hillsides and prevent erosion. When you harvest some of a stand's
canes, the underground rhizomes survive and continue to quickly
produce mature culms, unlike trees that die when chopped down.
The woody grass grows on every continent except at the poles. Its more
than 1,200 species include giant temperate timber bamboos such as
Moso, of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" fame; hardy mountain bamboos
such as Wolong, Fargesia robusta, a favorite snack of pandas, and
dwarf Pleioblastus distichus, a ground-cover bamboo so compact you can
mow it.
Clumping bamboos, such as Heinricher's Chilean feather babies, don't
spread and won't terrorize the neighborhood — unlike the unruly
rhizomes of running bamboos.
But bamboo does have a dark side: There isn't enough of it.
World demand is so high that old, naturalized bamboo forests are being
chopped down for textiles, lumber and pulp, creating havoc for
resident wildlife. Other times, grand bamboo stands are uprooted to
clear the way for roads and development, crops such as sugar cane or
timber plantations to satisfy the planet's hunger for wood.
Before tissue culture, it wasn't feasible to farm bamboo on
large-scale plantations because it was hard to find enough seed or
divisions to plant. Despite their invasive reputation, bamboos are in
short supply because most species flower and produce seed only once
every 60 to 120 years, and propagation by division is labor intensive
and iffy.
That all changed with the advent of cloned bamboo.
"We've never had a true supply of bamboo," Heinricher says. "We don't
know how big the market will be." Boo-Shoot is the main commercial
player in America, successfully cloning bamboo types that can be used
for horticulture, agriculture, industry and carbon mitigation. A
Belgian company, Oprins, clones mostly landscape bamboo. This winter,
Heinricher retrofitted her greenhouses, enabling her company to
produce 4 million plants a year.
Heinricher sees bamboo as an alternate lumber and source of pulp for
paper, a way to ease pressure on trees. Bamboo plantations on unused
agricultural land could be sustainably harvested while simultaneously
functioning as carbon sinks. And, she asks, what about highway
plantings for erosion control and noise reduction?
Asia, South America and Europe totally "get" bamboo, using the woody
grass in hundreds of ways, Heinricher says, but America has yet to
embrace bamboo for serious agriculture or industrial planting.
As it is, American companies buy bamboo products in Asia and ship them
here on freight containers. Not fuel efficient. "Why," Heinricher
says, "are we creating more carbon pollution and perpetuating the same
old bad practices?"
Already, Boo-Shoot is noodling deals with corporate titans from Asia.
Heinricher loves to tell of a Korean-Chinese executive who jetted into
Sea-Tac, then motored by limo up to the humble lab set among potato
fields and furniture outlets.
At first, he didn't believe that here, in Mount Vernon, they'd figured
out how to clone bamboo when the process hadn't been cracked on a
commercial scale in bamboo's heartland, Asia.
Then, Heinricher showed him racks of test tubes filled with tiny
bamboos and trays of little bamboo seedlings. Tears welled in his
eyes. "It was very emotional," Heinricher says, "for all of us."
THE BAMBOO empress was born in Seattle and grew up mostly in Olympia,
the middle daughter among three girls and a boy.
"She is different from the other kids," says her father, Jack
Heinricher, who now lives in Arizona. "Her sisters are kind of laid
back. Jackie wasn't. She took charge and wanted to be the leader.
She'd step out in front and try to do things, and if things didn't go
well, she was passionate about results." Intense and dramatic, her
family dubbed her "the actress."
Heinricher's mom was a homemaker; her father served as assistant state
auditor. He was also an avid gardener who planted golden bamboo
wherever they lived, the kids trailing him in the yard as he divided
clumps and cut runners.
Jackie: "I remember playing in it, a little jungle. I always thought
it was pretty neat. It just makes this incredible noise, and you could
crawl through it and make stuff out of the poles, and it has birds in
it, and it was always this enchanting little hiding place."
Heinricher's parents divorced when she was about 12, and she moved to
Colorado with her mom. "It was one of those divorces, a little bit
cantankerous, and it hit Jackie in particular because she's so
passionate," her father says. He describes her teenage years as "wild
and wandering." Heinricher recalls she skied a lot, left school,
earned a GED.
Joining the Army was a turning point. She trained as a nurse in the
Panama Canal Zone and worked the emergency room. She also learned to
scuba dive in tropical waters and did some underwater side jobs for
the Smithsonian Institution, which whet her appetite for studying
marine biology. After leaving the military, she traveled solo around
Asia for a year ("saw a lot of amazing bamboo"), earned a degree in
biology at the Evergreen State College, then applied for graduate
school in fisheries at Tennessee Tech University.
Phil Bettoli, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey who
directs the school's grad students, remembers their first meeting and
his surprise that Evergreen had no grades, just a dossier.
"This was the first indication this was not going to be your typical
grad student."
She was older, more mature, well traveled. "We didn't get students
from the Pacific Northwest in Tennessee," Bettoli says. "It was a
whole different attitude about the world. Thinking out of the box.
Constantly asking questions. Approaching her research with fresh eyes."
Heinricher's graduate work, on freshwater mussels, studied the impact
of a huge dam project on water temperature and mussel reproduction.
Typical grad students would have hung out with other fish-and-wildlife
researchers, relying heavily on traditional methods and studies,
Bettoli says. Heinricher took an original tack. "She ended up hooking
up with medical folks in town to do histology," working with
microscopes and slides. Heinricher's findings helped spur dam
officials to periodically release warmer water to trigger mussel spawning.
Her longtime friend, Holly Martin, remembers first meeting Heinricher
when touring the house Heinricher and her then-husband were selling.
Aroma wafted from a giant pile of chopped garlic on the kitchen table.
"It smells great! I love garlic!" Martin told Heinricher. They got to
talking about food, music, became fast friends. Martin and her husband
bought the house.
Heinricher recalls those years as "a lot of good times, and a bad
marriage." When Heinricher divorced, Martin and her husband invited
her to live with them while finishing her master's degree.
Martin: "Jackie wakes up at the crack of dawn and has an agenda every
morning, doesn't go to bed until she drops." And whether she's well
off or on the edge of disaster, "she still wears her blue jeans and
her work gloves and has a keen interest in farming equipment."
The following year, when Heinricher met Guy Thornburgh, Martin knew
he'd be The One.
Heinricher and Thornburgh had worked together on fisheries projects,
mostly via telephone, for years. When they finally shared a couple
beers at a conference and realized they were both available, it was
kismet. "She always seemed so cheery and ambitious," Thornburgh says.
"I'd have long commutes on the ferry to Shaw (Island) and I'd think of
her and write poems, and she'd write back."
Thornburgh, who owns a marine technology company, had recently
purchased seven acres on Campbell Lake in Anacortes; Heinricher moved
back to the Northwest and they married. She knew it would be tough to
find a fisheries job here because the Northwest spawns an
overabundance of fisheries experts. Plus, she'd always wanted to try
bamboo and now, finally, had acreage. They hired a guy with a tractor
to plow up the pasture; Heinricher and a girlfriend planted the first
groves from one-gallon containers.
Initially, Heinricher thought she'd market sliced edible bamboo shoots
and sell poles for garden projects. But she discovered bamboo didn't
spread fast enough in the Northwest's temperate climate to make poles
profitable, and she needed a value-added product to make money from
shoots. (Thus the kitchen experiments with bamboo-shoot chips. Salty
sesame was the best, Thornburgh says.)
She tried selling plants wholesale, for the nursery trade, but again,
couldn't produce enough through division.
Then, her Chilean bamboo flowered.
Heinricher stayed out in the greenhouse past dark every night,
settling her bamboo-lets into 5 ½-inch pots while listening to Sting.
"People thought I was nuts. How was I ever going to get rid of 10,000
bamboo plants?" she says. "I thought it was the most wonderful work,
and I was excited about it."
She also realized that once her seedlings were sold (it took five
years), that was it. No more seeds. She became determined to crack the
tissue-culture code.
REMEMBER THE Boston fern craze? Those ruffly green fronds in the
hanging macrame planters with the big wooden beads?
Thank Randy Burr. Burr pioneered commercial propagation of Boston
ferns in 1973, started this country's first commercial tissue-culture
lab and has since cloned numerous horticultural hits: lily bulbs,
orchids, birch trees, Japanese maples, cabbage and cauliflower for
seed production.
He co-owned the Mount Vernon lab where Heinricher germinated her
Chilean bamboo seeds and was impressed by her success. But when she
asked him to tissue-culture bamboo? "I just rolled my eyes," he
recalled. "I knew bamboo would be difficult. I had tried it before
with no success."
She kept coming around with plant material. "If you have patience,
I'll try it," he told her. "No promises."
Tissue culture is a four-step process. First, you sterilize a cutting
of the plant in bleach, bathe it in a solution of inorganic salts,
vitamins, plant hormones and sugar and set it in agar gel. Step 2: Get
the plant to make side shoots and replant them in more gel. Stage 3:
Stop the multiplying and encourage root growth. Step 4: Acclimatize
the plants for the real world by growing them in dirt in the greenhouse.
"Most plants, maybe one of those steps will give you a problem," Burr
says. With bamboo, "every one of those four steps was a battle."
Burr rubs the top of his balding head when describing his initial
failures: "Oh, I'm good at killing plants, especially good at bamboo.
Those first years, I killed thousands."
After six months, a cutting sent out roots — wild celebration! — but
then withered and died. For two more years, no luck. "Look Jackie,
it's not going to work. I can't afford to do this," Burr told her.
"She was like, Yeah Yeah Yeah. Gotta have bamboo! Her enthusiasm
definitely kept me going." She paid for the research by selling the
Chilean feather bamboos, "creative financing," personal investment and
a trip to the bank.
Carrie Cammock, assistant vice president at People's Bank in Mount
Vernon: "It was one of the most unique loan requests I've ever worked
on, if I can diplomatically say it that way."
After more than four years of trial and error, Burr developed the
magic formula for Crookstem bamboo, then Sunset Glow, Fargesia 'Rufa,'
a mountain clumper.
"The first plants we put out, we were maybe charging $5 and they had
to be worth thousands of dollars each," Heinricher says. "Plus, people
were still wrinkling their noses and saying: 'Oh, it's bamboo.' It's
something people have to be a little more educated to appreciate."
BUT WILL they?
After touring the amazing bamboo specimen garden at Heinricher's
Anacortes home, we drive to Boo-Shoot's Mount Vernon lab in her Ford
Explorer. She needs a big rig for her two German shorthairs, she says,
and feels bad about her fuel consumption, even though she's planted
enough bamboo to mitigate seven lifetimes of gas guzzlers. That spurs
talk about bamboo's role on the global stage; Heinricher recently
talked with members of Washington's congressional delegation on
Capitol Hill about bamboo's carbon-scrubbing capabilities and
potential use domestically for other products.
A logging truck whizzes by, loaded with hefty firs. "Wouldn't it be
nice to see bamboo poles in the stacker?" Heinricher asks. If you're
stuck in a traditional evergreen mindset, it's hard to envision an
alternative Northwest landscape. But why not? With gas prices soaring
and the earth ever warming, something has to change in the oil
economy. We spin past the belching Anacortes oil refinery, various RV
and tractor dealerships, a brand new sawmill. "Heartbreaking that it's
not a bamboo facility," Heinricher says.
Imagine underutilized farmland growing 50- to 70-foot bamboos, she
says. "We could put those people in Longview back to work."
Think of the vineyards now blanketing Walla Walla's hillsides. Before
they were there, somebody had a vision to plant all those grapes.
We pull into Boo-Shoot's parking lot and Heinricher heads back to
check the greenhouses. Minute by minute, a million tiny bamboo-lets
are quickly outgrowing their trays.
Paula Bock is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. E-mail:
pbock@seattletimes.com. Tom Reese is a Seattle Times staff photographer.
Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
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