How do you propagate a plant that only flowers every 60 to 120 years? Certainly not from seed.

And division isn't all that easy either - especially when it relates to non-invasive species of bamboo. You can rule out grafting, cuttings, leaf propagation, root propagation: all of them are fairly redundant when it comes to reproducing a plant wrongly stigmatized as a pest.

The key, it appears, is in scientific plant tissue. Test tubes are now becoming the new birth centres of many of these plants after Jackie Heinricher and Randy Burr, owners of Boo-Shoot Gardens started experimenting with possible ways to cultivate these species.

The result is an incredible array of clumping bamboos that may someday threaten the cotton industry as becoming the fabric of ecological choice.