From Bamboo Jungle to Open Sky: How One Man Solved a 30-Year Garden Crisis
When Jessie Cole was just a baby, her parents embarked on an ambitious gardening project that would eventually transform their property into a wild, self-sustaining forest. Through her childhood, she watched her father—a man of immediate action—and her mother tend to plants with the same care they gave their family. "My mother had to be careful what dreams she spoke aloud," Cole recalls, "as by afternoon he would have brought them into actuality." This created an environment where the world felt governable, shaped by her father's hands.
The Unforeseen Consequences of a Beautiful Dream
After her father's passing during her late teens, the garden began its gradual surrender to nature. Thirty years later, what remained was a forest that required constant maintenance just to prevent complete engulfment of their home. Among the various trees were several stands of clumping bamboo, including one "giant" bamboo grove planted on a low plateau at the property's furthest edge.
"Even giant bamboo starts out small," Cole explains, "and when my parents planted it, it was impossible to tell just how mammoth it would become." For years after her father's death, well-meaning neighbors warned that the bamboo would eventually get out of hand, but in its prime, the twenty-meter-tall, twenty-meter-wide grove was majestic—a vibrant display of dark-green stalks reaching skyward.
"We were protective of its beauty," Cole admits, "and could not envisage the chaotic mess it would become."
Natural Disasters Create an Impenetrable Terrain
The situation deteriorated dramatically through multiple catastrophic floods, a severe drought, and finally a cyclone that struck last year. The once-majestic bamboo grove became a disaster zone—towering stalks snapped and suspended in mid-air, fallen bamboo too heavy to lift littering the ground, and other cyclone-toppled trees creating an inaccessible, criss-crossing maze.
"The whole area had become, like a hoarder's house, impenetrable terrain," Cole describes. The family sought quotes from numerous tree-loppers and machinery operators, but all declined the job. The questions were too daunting: How long would it take? How much would it cost? What could be done with the voluminous debris?
The Right Helper with the Right Tools
Last winter brought a breakthrough when they heard about a local man with a large machine. Interestingly, he had visited years earlier and declined the job because his equipment wasn't big enough. Now, with a more powerful excavator, he surveyed the wild disarray and simply said: "Yeah, I can do that."
Cole sensed immediately that this quiet, borderline-shy man was different—not a "shit-talker" but someone who genuinely believed the job could be done. His work proved transformative. Rather than creating more mess, he used his excavator to pluck each stalk from the ground, roots and all, with delicate precision that reminded Cole of "unpicking a hem."
The process took days, but when the last stalks were removed—root balls completely gone—the revelation was breathtaking. "The shock of the sky above—so vast—made me strangely ecstatic," Cole remembers. The bamboo's canopy had ballooned to double or triple its twenty-meter base width, blocking their sky for years.
From Mountain to Ash: The Final Transformation
A week later, the man returned to burn the giant stacks of bamboo. As a member of the Rural Fire Service, he understood fire safety perfectly, choosing a rainy midwinter period for the operation. Starting small, he used the excavator's arm as a fire-stoker, feeding bamboo to the flames in controlled lots.
Within days, what had been mountains of plucked bamboo became mere ash. "It was an insurmountable problem, until suddenly it was not," Cole reflects. "How could something so big be reduced to something so small?" She thought of her father—how much he would have enjoyed both the transformation and the rediscovery of their sky.
The Enduring Lesson: Light Beyond the Darkness
Cole's experience offers a powerful metaphor for life's overwhelming challenges. "Sometimes things get away from us. We completely lose control. Paralysis sets in, no solution in sight," she observes. "The problem gets so big, there's no possibility of light."
Yet her story demonstrates that even the most impassable mountains can become tiny specks of ash. The sky remains above, even when invisible. What's needed is often simply the right kind of helper with the right kind of tools—whether literal machinery or metaphorical support systems.
For Cole and her mother, the cleared land now represents more than just reclaimed property. It symbolizes hope, resilience, and the enduring possibility of transformation, no matter how daunting the challenge appears initially.
