Common Name : Berry Bamboo, Muli Bamboo

It is a unique bamboo which produces the largest fruits in the grass family. Its gregarious flowering once in 45–50 years in north east India and adjacent regions is a botanical enigma, resulting in a glut of fruits. Bamboo with a sympodial rhizome having slender elongated necks, forming an open and diffuse clump with some distance (up to 1 m) between the culms. Culm erect and straight but with pendulous tips, 10-15(-20) m tall, diameter 1.5-7.5 cm near the base, wall thick at base but thin above, green when young turning yellow or yellow-brown when old, often finely striated; internodes hollow, at midculm 25-50 cm long, smooth, glabrous, with white ring below the nodes; nodes not swollen. Branches from midculm upwards, many at each node, subequal, easily removable from the node. Culm sheath 8-15 cm long, 14 cm wide at the base, up to 6 cm wide near the truncate or concave apex, persistent, light green when young becoming stramineus, covered with pale or fine white hairs; blade erect with spreading tip, broadly to narrowly lanceolate, 10-20(-30) cm × 7-18 mm, glabrous, persistent; ligule very short; auricles indistinct. Young shoot yellowish-brown, sheath margins and top pinkish. Leaf blade oblong-lanceolate, 14-28 cm × 3-5 cm, glabrous (young seedlings have larger leaf blades than adult plants); sheath glabrous; ligule very short; auricles indistinct, bearing long bristles. Inflorescence usually terminating a leafy branch (occasionally borne on a leafless branch), 15-45 cm long, with few to several lax flexuous branches of different length, each bearing groups of pseudospikelets at each node along one side of the axis. Fruit an ovoid to globose baccate caryopsis, 4-12 cm × 3-6 cm, pear-like with more or less curved beak, glabrous, smooth, weighing 47-180 g; pericarp fleshy, very thick but thinner at base.