154 THE BAMBOO GARDEN CHAP. VI 
have a few cross veinlets, which are for the most part re- 
placed by dots. They soon wither and perish. The leaf 
sheaths of the branchlets, which are borne in twos and threes, 
are of a very pretty pink, and this, with the partly-coloured 
stem and leaves, gives the plant an extremely ornamental and 
peculiar tricoloured appearance. These sheaths are furnished 
with long rather coarse purple hairs at the insertion of the 
leaf. The bud scales are a very pale yellowish green. 
The lanceolate leaves, in which the petiole is well marked, 
are larger than in most of the Phyllostachys family. Some 
of them are as much as from 8 to 9 inches long by nearly 
2 inches broad, but they vary greatly. I have found as 
many as eight secondary nerves on either side of the mid- 
rib. The tessellation is extremely neat and visible to the 
naked eye. One edge is very sharply serrated, the other less 
so. The colour is a glossy, rather dark green, beautifully 
variegated with stripes, which at first are a bright orange, 
fading presently to acreamy white. The lower face of the leaf 
is glaucous, with the variegation rather sad-coloured and dingy. 
One of my plants shows a curious deviation from the type 
in the disposition of the colours. Some of the shoots have 
self-coloured dark green leaves without any trace of variega- 
tion ; and where this is the case the colouring on the stems 
is reversed, the groove of each internode being yellow and the 
rest green—an elaborate freak of Nature which it requires more 
learning than I possess to account for, or even to theorise upon. 
The Japanese name KIMMEI-CHIKU, “the golden brilliant 
Bamboo,” is appropriate and significant. 
At Leonardslee this Bamboo has grown to a fiaieht of 9 
feet 8 inches with a circumference of 22 inches. 
