After lunch, we traveled to Burton's Bamboo Gardens near Morrow, Ohio. This is the first time our group has visited Burton's and we found this because of an article in the Ohio Magazine and word of mouth. Burton's grows Bamboo for a number of purposes, such as food for Pandas. However, this venture started a number of years ago as a hobby for Jerry.
Jerry Burton discussed the growing of Bamboo and many of the uses for Bamboo, today. This part of the tour was very interesting and Jerry did a nice job of discussing Bamboo with us in his Haiku House. One interesting thing that I came away with was that we must take particular care when growing Bamboo to restrict the growth. We need to place a physical barrier in the soil to prevent the roots from spreading where we don’t want the plants to grow (such as neighbor’s gardens).
The garden grounds included lots of interesting things. These included oriental statuary, exotic birds, and of course Bamboo. This particular statue looks lots better with some of our people around it, don’t you think?
We looked at lots of Bamboo and even took a short trek through one Bamboo grove. Look out for those snakes!
The most interesting birds we saw were some Cassowaries. I couldn’t get a decent photo because they were in cages and the lighting was poor. These are in the Ostrich family and his are from Papua New Guinea. I've been to Papua New Guinea but never saw any of these before here. Jerry’s Cassowaries were about 7 feet tall and had double chins. We also saw Peafowl (Peacocks to me) and Phoenix Chickens.
I think everyone enjoyed this trip and found it interesting.
If you are interested in learning more or perhaps visiting Burton’s on your own, you can visit their website, www.BurtonsBambooGarden.com
