Yes, there will be bamboo at the new garden; of course, there will be bamboo in the garden. In fact, I have already setup hundreds of bamboo prims (more on this below).

Concerning Bamboo Transparencies
One of the primary themes in all of my gardens is that they sit on the edge of a bamboo forest. This may sound like an easy enough idea to implement, but finding the right bamboo trees in Second Life is problematic. I’ve looked at the products of many vendors. Zen Serenity Shop has nice bamboo but it has Full Bright turned on and that just makes it useless to me. And there are other vendors but I keep coming back to Heart’s Garden Center. Heart has two different types of bamboo, Giant Green Bamboo and the smaller Golden Bamboo, and I use both.

One important limitation to keep in mind when gardening in Second Life is, you will probably have to make significant compromises with tree selection and inland water features. Trees with transparencies are a challenge, and trees with megaprims are a major challenge.

If you build using prims with transparency then you know about the problem of transparent on transparent. But if you have a megaprim object and it has transparent textures, did you know that it’s transparency will basically burn thru or bleed right thru all other transparencies in it’s line of sight? It is a major problem. Nonetheless, I use special techniques to minimize the megaprim transparency problem and as a result, I’m able to use the massiveness of the Giant bamboo to wrap our property in a bamboo forest and combine it with the Golden bamboo to add detail.

I estimate the garden is 70% complete, but that last 10% is always like the “10% that takes 90% of the time.” Nonetheless, I am pretty sure we’ll have the new garden open to the public at month end.