A useful and also very attractive cultivated species, with culms reaching 5cm in diameter and 12m in height. In its natural forest environment this is a scrambling bamboo, but it is usually cultivated in self-supporting clumps. This is a very easy species to recognise, as the culm sheaths have distinctive long-fringed edges at the top. The leaf sheaths have no auricles, but they have a few very upright bristles, and the edge of the ligule also has long bristles and cilia. The culms also make this species easy to recognise, as they have a distinctive corky collar around each node. This helps to support the flexible upper sections of the culms as they straggle over tree branches. As it is such a pendulous bamboo, the culms are very flexible, and the long internodes of up to 50cm make them very useful for weaving, which is the main use of 

this bamboo, as the culm walls are too thin for the culms to be of structural value. The leaves are large, up to 40cm long, and can be used as fodder. The branches are irregular in shape, with curving internodes, and swollen nodes. This allows re-orientation towards the light, and helps to support the scrambling branches. The central branch is only slightly larger than the rest, and it often bears aerial roots. Propagation by culm cuttings should be feasible because of these aerial roots. This species was first described with the name Dendrocalamus patellaris, but it is now known that the flowers originally collected came from a clump of Dendrocalamus hamiltonii instead. It is common in Sikkim at 1,200-1,800m, and is likely to be encountered somewhere in southern Bhutan. A widespread flowering occurred around 1980.