Chinese Foliage!

 Some 1/35 and 1/48 scale plants are available from hobby link japan. Wako products Both work well in dioramas.

http://www.hlj.com/product/WKO85026

Jim Heikkala

Bamboo forests are usually limited in size. In China you will also have forests of hardwoods and evergreens depending on the area (climate, etc.). One point about plant geography is that the hardwood trees of the Eastern US forests have their closest kin in eastern Asia. This is one of the reasons that the Asian Longhorned Beetle and Emerald Ash Borer are devastating invaders, they fell upon their favorite foods in a far away land, the Eastern US.

Here are some pictures of bamboo groves, usually there isn't much ground cover as the fallen bamboo leaves will smother it. Bamboo groves will be found alongside broadleaf forests. - Mike T.

I make several species of bamboo from kits and from scratch.  If you look at the photo below in the background you can see some bamboo along the creek bed.  This was a kit by a company called Kamazakuri but the bamboo I make from scratch is much better.  This diorama is not finished yet, I still have a lot to do but it was the only photo I had with bamboo right now.  It is also a very large diorama (over 70 sq ft) that I am working on right now and it is in a larger scale, I picked 1:22 scale for this dio.  Sorry the bamboo was not the subject of this photo so it is a little out of focus, but it is the only photo I had that was already in Photobucket that showed the bamboo at all. This is a tedious project, it isn't hard but it is very time consuming and takes a lot of cutting to make the repeating leaf patterns and in small scales my method might be difficult, but it will work in larger scales if you have the patience to make the foliage.  

What I do is to use wire, clay and paper.  I start with the thinnest floral wire I can find and I cut it to the length I want my bamboo to be.  Then I roll a very thin layer of paper clay or any easy to work with air dry clay over each piece.  Once that is done I score the divisions in the stem and when it is dry I paint it.  Now for the fun part, I had a stencil custom made that makes the leaf pattern I am using and I either put it on paper or the I roll out some of the air dry clay I made the stems with as thin as I can and mark the shape of the foliage.  I then cut the paper or clay using an exacto knife and again, once done I paint them.  All I do after that is to glue the leaf sets to the stems and I have bamboo.  To make smaller scale just use a smaller leaf size, or if I am making different species I have also used different leaf pattern, for instance I have made black bamboo and tree bamboo using the same method.  It takes a lot of practice but the results are really nice and deffinitly worth the effort for me.

Living and working in SE Asia, I am pretty familiar with bamboo forests and I don't recommend using any of the commercially available model/replica bamboo as it tends to have the segments grossly over emphasised and is not very realistic at all.

In reality, most bamboo (there are many different types) shows little variation in diameter at the segment joints. Even a very mature bamboo stalk (15-20cm diameter) will only flare out a few millimetres at the joints at most. This will be negligible in most scales.

I recommend just using wire, evergreen rod, bamboo skewers or any other rod-like media that you can think of. A bamboo stalk will gradually taper from the base to the end. More mature bamboo forests may have thick stalks of 20-30m in length, with the fine foliage mostly toward the upper half. The top portion tends to curl/arc. A Google search should reveal plenty of pics for reference.

You didn't mention what scale you are working with but I'll assume it is 1/35. even in this scale, I reckon you can get away with replicating the segments by simply painting them. Perhaps try marking the segments with a fine marking pen ("Sharpie" or similar) then spray a thin coat or two of lime green (US interior green would be a good base colour) over the whole thing, then finish by highlighting the joints with a light and fine spray of yellowish tan. You could then vary the lime green base coat by some drybushing of different green shades (remember to do your brush strokes longitudinally). I admit that I haven't tried this myself but I reckon it would be OK.

Bamboo generally grows in clumps, in which most stalks will be roughly the same size, though seeing thick (old) and thin (new) stalks are not uncommon. Don't forget to include some dead stalks (usually earthy brown to tan in colour) and a few bamboo shoots (tall, conical shapes and usually a pale reddish purple colour). Also, there tends to be a lot of "trash" on the floor of a bamboo forest; bamboo loses a "skin" as it grows (just like a lizard), so this, along with leaves, twigs, etc form a brownish mat on the forest floor. 

Note: I have rarely seen yellow bamboo growing wild; it is mostly ornamental. It may form forests in China but I really don't know. I'd stick with pale green colour with some subtle variations to break up the uniformity.

http://www.scalehobbyist.com/catagories/Objects/VER00002377/product.php?s=0&t=10&u=0&micr=953&pg=1&ppp=24&sb=stocknumber&so=a

you could try that, but I dont know if it is what you are looking for