Bamboo Man sprouts in Brush Prairie-area barn

Jim Grandy puts the finishing touches on a gate he built with bamboo, cedar and lodgepole pine for a Portland estate. (N. Scott Trimble/The Columbian)

Like so many gardening projects, it grew from a trellis.

Not a vegetable or a flower: What blossomed was bamboo artistry.

Now the Asian-flavored fruits of Jim Grandy’s labors are found in all kinds of gardens. His products range from a water feature for a pocket paradise to a teahouse for an estate-of-the-art showplace.

Although he does business as “The Bamboo Man,” there is plenty of crossover in Grandy’s creations. His workshop, in a weathered barn east of Brush Prairie, also is stocked with slabs of oak, locust and black walnut from Northwest trees and reclaimed lumber from long-gone buildings.

One of his summer projects was a pair of wooden gates destined for an estate in Portland’s West Hills. Each gate section was built with lodgepole pine, cedar and bamboo.

Grandy, 51, said he really wasn’t looking to the Far East for inspiration when he started this career 14 years ago. He was looking down, for a solid month.

“I was hurt, an eye injury, and I was facedown for 30 days,” said Grandy, a Columbia River High School graduate who was living in Wenatchee back then. He spent a lot of time wondering about his future, and started thinking about garden structures.

Once Grandy got back on his feet, “I did trellises, just to be doing something.”

He built a dozen or so, and sold all of them in Seattle.

“I came back with $300 or $400, and there were orders on the phone for more,” Grandy said. “I’d been in business before, but this was fun. I was going to be rich! Then I discovered how seasonal it was.”

Grandy’s business continued to evolve, including a significant encounter with bamboo.

“When I touched it, it sent me down this path,” Grandy said. “Bamboo led me to Japanese designs.”

Another big step came when a prospective customer asked if Grandy could build a teahouse.

“Oh, sure,” Grandy replied. And then … “I spent three weeks figuring out how to frame the first corner.”

A popular garden feature, he said, “is a little bus-stop-type thing I call a ‘Zen stop.’”

Grandy has won a lot of awards at garden shows up and down the West Coast. It helped him keep a nice wholesale business going, but “I got burned out on shows,” he said.

And being part of the assembly-line process for Northwest nurseries wasn’t the most satisfying experience, Grandy said: “Here’s the stuff, there’s the money. Thank you.”

Now Grandy is concentrating on custom work. Still, he doesn’t seem to take himself or his creations — “country Japanese” he calls it — too seriously.

“I’ve never been a really great carpenter,” he said. “This is massive stuff, and my fine joints aren’t that great.”

But something seems to happen when he moves a structure out of his shop and installs it in someone’s garden.

“I feel a different vibration. It’s way better,” he said. “People are smiling; they’re happy.”

Contact “The Bamboo Man” at 360-604-1945.