the bamboo grove

Tucked away in the corner of a college campus North Georgia is a timber bamboo grove planted more than 100 years ago. In the early 1920s, Brenau College president Haywood Jefferson Pearce hired Shogo Joseph Mayaida, a young landscape architect from Japan, to design the landscape for Camp Takeda (a summer camp for girls operated by the college) and a Japanese-style garden behind the president’s home. This stand of bamboo and a concrete sculpture are all that remain of the gardens and camp. The bamboo soars to more than 50 feet high and is up to 2 feet in circumference.