Pearson - 1991 Bamboo October 21- La Veranada. Read leaves from branches of two known-age culms (3 year old, hence 2 years of leaf production). Many of the branches had 8 leaves, clearly 4 + 4 with a long gap between each set of 4, but a fairly long gap between 3 and 4 and 7 and 8. Also many of the branches had a fairly long (35 to 49mm) furled terminal leaf. Since it is so early in the spring, this leaf must have started to grow last summer or fall and will continue this spring. Hence a long season last year and maybe the year before. Leaf lengths were short long long short. Another culm of unknown age that was related to the rhizomes under study had as many as 17 leaves and leaf scars, or 6 long interleaf gaps, hence probably was 6 or 7 years old (5 or 6 crops of leaves). October 24.- Cerro Otto. A few patches of snow still, lenga leaves partly out, lots of earth cores. Dug up an entire, isolated clump [the Dead Sea Clump] near clump A2; it consists of 19 culms in a nicely graded size series ranging from 2.0 mm in diameter to 20 mm at ground level, not counting a pair of big "new shoots" that didn't quite make it above ground, one of them dead and the other almost dead. The gradient of diameters of culms matches nicely their place of emergence along the zigzag rhizome. The diameters of the successive culms increased rather steadily through production of the 13th culm (7.3 mm0, then increased abruptly to 12.5 mm (a 5-yr-old culm), and increased again steadily until production of the last three culms, which were between 18 and 20 mm. The oldest, smallest 9 culms were all dead, 10 and 11 were alive, 12 was dead, and the rest were alive. The youngest two were yearlings coming off of opposite sides of the same rhizome, whose terminal culm was 4 years old and was the biggest of all the culms (20 mm diam at ground level). The smallest living culm was the oldest of the live culms, judging from its position along the sequence of rhizomes, and also judging from its leaf cohorts (7 cohorts = 8 years old). There were at least 9 smaller, dead culms, so the clump probably started from a seed several years earlier, giving a total age of at least 10 and probably more than 15 years for this small clump. No dead clumps remained nearby that might have served as a seed source. [new culms not produced every year]. October 28.- Llao Llao. At B2, one new shoot was up about 5 inches. It came off of a rhizome ending in a broken-top '89-'90 #1, hence 2 years old. Another new shoot up only 1 inch. Its rhizome terminated in a little dead shoot that protruded only about 1 inch above ground. It might be 1 year old, or we might have overlooked it last spring, in which case it would be 2 years old. Note that the new shoot was doing well without any help from this parent shoot, which was dead and had never amounted to anything. It was not