Spotted this on the bbc doc. called wild china, it's at roughly 28:00 in the second episode, entitled shangri la...

It's very worthwhile to watch, just disappointing as always that it is focused so little on plants...tho it did focus on them more than most shows...

Any help or suggestions are welcomed!

Not a clue, but I would never know anyway.

I did watch a couple (2 I think) Wild China episodes on the web. Most excellent! It was quite a while ago, and all the episodes were not available. Can they all be accessed now?

Whew, I have been searching and have learned a bit.

Still don't have an answer, but you could start by looking at
Bambusa vulgaris 'wamin' aka Giant Buddha's Belly Bamboo aka Lumpy Noodle, or
Bambusa ventricosa aka Small Buddha's Belly Bamboo
(the 'giant' and 'small' refer to the size of the bulge in the culm, not the size of the plant).

One thing I have learned is that the 'belly' or swollen part of the stem occurs when the plant is stressed. Perhaps the plant in the photo was purposely put under stress to produce a desired effect?

I still don't know much but am having fun looking!

Ahah - Now I think it is more likely this one:

Phyllostachys heterocycla On this link: http://www.botanic.jp/plants-k... it says ""Kikko-chiku" (Phyllostachys pubescens var. heterocycla) belongs to the family Poaceae (the Grass family). It is a mutant of "Moso-chiku" which is native to southern China. The internodes of underneath culms are swollen alternately, and form hexagonal shapes. It is often planted as an ornamental bamboo in gardens, and it is famous as a fancy bamboo of Kyoto."

Link: http://www.takehei.jp/global/t...

Hrm...

I also sent that pic to a few friends aswell, one of them helped lead me down the right path, he said it was a timber type, phyllostackys... From there it was just a matter of time, clicking links to different pics...there's only a couple hundred different phyllostackys...much less daunting than the whole bamboo family, 1500 species!

Sooo...I came up with phyllostackys edulis 'hetercycla...
Though I did notice a few difference between it and the plant I posted...mainly there's some extra knobs on each internode of the one I posted...

I also found that it's rather popular in japan, they call it kikko, which apparently means tortoise shell!

All this leads to one point!
This plant is basically not available in the US...

I found a few mentions of it selling for thousands of dollars here in the past, but no promising leads on actually getting any...I can't even pay hundreds much less thousands!
So I'm just going to erase this plant from my want list...and go on about my life...unless of course anyone has any promising leads...

Thanks a bunch @greene, I feel bad not having posted this yesterday, I hope it didn't cost you too much sleep!

Whatever,
I have lost interest by now.

My guess would also be P. edulis heterocycla:

http://www.bamboobotanicals.ca...

http://les-jardins-de-la-poter...

No photo's in the database yet: Tortoise Shell Bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis 'Heterocycla')