“Irish piping is considered an almost lunatic fringe, but we have our needs,” said Anderson, who takes home the plant species Arundo donax to cure for two years in his garage rafters, then scrapes the bamboo-like tubes into reeds to place inside his uilleann and highland pipes.
Anderson hunts with passion, squishing through muck, dangling over rapids as the sharp weed slices his hands and looking out for the California canebrake rattlesnake. But a good stalk is hard to find these days, because arundo is considered a botanical pest to nearly everyone but certain musicians. The flammable, nonnative plant spreads prodigiously, destroying ecosystems, redirecting river flows, igniting fires, causing flooding and creating expensive beach cleanup projects once it washes out to sea.
A statewide consortium of environmental and government organizations dubbed Team Arundo methodically kills off the species, which also consumes three times the water of other plants. The state has spent over $25 million to raze cane, but a handful of musical aficionados are raising cane — at least among themselves — over eradication of their beloved reed.
“Team Arundo wiped out some of the best stuff on the Sonoma River,” said Anderson, who also said he understood the plant’s destructive reputation. Two bridges in San Diego County collapsed in recent years when pushed off their pylons by mats of arundo washing downstream. High in wax content, the weed also poses an extreme fire hazard, flaring up like dynamite explosions within a wildfire. “Everybody from firefighters to environmentalists hates it,” said Daniel Cozad, president of Integrated Planning Management, a Redlands water-consulting firm. Arundo is bad seed, all right.
Yet the Europeans importing it during the 1820s prized the reed for windbreaks, roofing, basket weaving, fencing, wicker furniture and animal fodder. For a time, the Army Corps of Engineers planted it for erosion control, later learning its root network can instead rip away riverbanks. “People have sent me nasty letters asking how I could plant such an invasive thing,” said Marsha Taylor, a Eugene, Ore., oboist who wrote her 1971 master’s thesis on arundo while studying at the California Institute of the Arts.
However, Taylor carefully isolates her tiny crop, which she uses to make the softer reeds needed to play Baroque oboe. For musical use, however, nothing compares with arundo, which was used to make the syrinx, or panpipe, of Greek mythology. It also serves folk and historical instruments like the shawm and crumhorn, and classical woodwind players worldwide use it.
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