David Cater is a Texas bamboo farmer, which is a strange occupation. For starters, bamboo does exceedingly well in our part of Texas. You don't grow it, exactly; you get out of its way.

Gardeners will tell you that there are two kinds of bamboo — the clumping kind and the spreading kind - and they will warn you never, ever to plant the spreading kind because it will take over your whole yard, and then your whole block, and then the world. Bamboo, they'll tell you darkly, is like that.

That anti-bamboo prejudice gets under Cater's skin. He loves the plant in all its species and varieties. He loves its different heights and colors and leaves. He loves the way it sounds in the wind. And he especially loves the way it grows.

The world, he argues, is out of balance, is being taken over by parking lots. And the best way to fight parking lots, he figures, is with a grass that can grow up to 75 feet tall, and as much as 3 feet in a single day.

"So what if bamboo takes over the world?" he said to me recently. "Would that be so bad?"

We were sitting in the dense shade of a tall bamboo at Utility Research Garden, Cater's insanely beautiful bamboo-and-vegetable farm in Brazoria County. Somewhere deep inside the plant a tree frog was peeping, and every now and then a breeze would set the hollow culms to clacking like a giant wooden wind chime.

No, I thought. A world full of bamboo: That wouldn't be bad at all.

'Nothing wrong with planting bamboo'

"At some point you look back on life and it seems to have an order," Cater said. He was talking about Joseph Campbell's idea about a heroic journey, about the way that we tell stories to make sense of our lives.

This is the story that Cater tells. He grew up in West U., the son of a busy single mother. The world crystallized for him in 1981, when he was 13.

"I was standing on Bellaire near Buffalo Speedway, where we lived. I was probably waiting to meet my buddy Matt and smoke a joint. It was getting dark, and people were driving home from work at the Medical Center. And I looked at them, each alone in their expensive cars, and I thought, 'Is that all there is?' They seemed so lonely, so disconnected to everything and everyone around them."

He spent summers at his granddad's farm in Waller, but raising corn, cattle and peanuts the conventional way didn't appeal to him. He used the skills he picked up, though, to land a job at Teas Nursery. He spent a year riding his motorcycle around Europe, then drifted to Austin, where he had friends in school. Over time, he built up a successful landscape-design business there.

But he wasn't happy. It dawned on him that he was just creating more loneliness, "creating private pleasure grounds in a person's backyard so they wouldn't have to go out in the world."

He grew interested in bamboo - he just felt attracted to the plant - and through it, he met Darwin Nelson, a much older psychologist who lives in Corpus Christi. Darwin had planted bamboo along the Nueces River, and when Cater came to help him harvest the shoots, they'd sit in a tent, talking all night.

"It was like hanging out with the Dalai Lama," Cater says. "Darwin works some kind of jujitsu communication on you. You don't really understand him until later."

For two years, when Cater talked about his dissatisfaction, Darwin would tell him: Get some land. Plant some bamboo.

One day, Cater asked, "Why do you keep telling me that?"

And Darwin replied: "There is nothing wrong with planting bamboo."

Suddenly, Cater's world clicked into focus: With bamboo, he could fight the evils of the paved world. And through bamboo, he'd made some of his best friends.

He repeats the sentence like a mantra: "There is nothing wrong with planting bamboo."

Grown with good intentions

He got soil maps from the Texas Department of Agriculture, and looked for the best place in Texas to grow bamboo. Four years ago, he bought 24 acres in Brazoria County. He still has a house and garden in Austin. But about half of his nights he spends in Brazoria County, in the canvas yurt where he sleeps with the half-dozen guys who work at Utility Research Garden.

Besides bamboo, they raise vegetables and fruit - around 80 different kinds, heirloom varieties, grown without chemicals, grown, as he likes to put it, "with good intentions." Some are planted in a bed shaped like a half-moon, the rows curved for no reason other than beauty. Bean and cucumber vines climb bamboo trellises, which are far more attractive than they have to be. Beauty matters to Cater.

Most weeks he drives the harvest to farmers' markets in Houston. He gets tired of all the those hours on the road, and it doesn't help that the farmers' markets are all in parking lots. Parking lots are the enemy.

But for him, there remains nothing wrong with planting bamboo. He's happy on the farm. He loves filling orders for the bamboo, sending his plants out into the world to do battle with the asphalt. What could be wrong with more oxygen?

Bamboo, he likes to say, is a monocarpic plant, which means that it lives life, then blooms and dies. That's a heroic way to live, he says. It's what we should all do.