Celebrating Visionaries in Bamboo Innovation

Ximena Londono de la Pava lives in a paradise. The Paradise of Bamboo and Guadua. The place she dreamt of as a child, when she ran free through the coffee plantation and the Guadua stands at the farm La Esmeralda, in the mythic archeological region of Pueblo Tapao in the municipality of Montenegro, Quindío, Colombia.

Her father, Héctor Londono Convers, one of the founders of the Coffee Growing Committee in the State of Quindío moved his family, made up by his wife Sofia de la Pava de Londono and their children, from Cali to this farm in 1960. Her contact with the farmland in Quindío from such a young age marked her life and made her aware of the subject of agriculture and of Guadua.

Ximena Londono graduated as an agricultural engineer from the National University of Colombia, campus of Palmira, specialist in the taxonomic botany of the American bamboos, with emphasis on the Guadua genus. She has created a small thematic park in one part of her grandparent's farm that has no equal in Latin America because of the exuberance and beauty of nature that is highlighted here by this giant grass, Guadua.

Her graduation thesis as a candidate to agronomic engineering at Universidad Nacional de Colombia was a comparative study of the plants associated to the Guadua stands of Valle del Cauca and Quindío. With the degree in her hand, she travelled to the Amazons to work in a Colombo-Dutch project to incorporate Guadua in the daily activities of the settlers of that region: as fuel, as a means to build housing, rural infrastructure etc., contributing thus to counter arrest the logging of the jungle and the expansion of the agricultural frontier.

From that time onwards, Ximena emerged as one of the most serious scholars of Guadua in the country. She travelled to Washington D.C., where she devoted herself to studying the botanical characteristics of the Guadua genus at the Smithsonian Institute under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas R. Soderstrom (World Bamboo Pioneer 2015), a world expert in the taxonomy of the Bambusoideae. She was awarded several research scholarships from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Geographic Society, the American Bamboo Society, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the International Timber Organization, and Colciencias among others, which allowed her to do botanical work in several Latin American countries, like Brazil, Guyana, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, and to advance in the taxonomic knowledge of the American bamboos. She has been an independent researcher since then, living a very active life around the botanical research of bamboo.

Ximena Londono has several scientific publications to her name, among which we can highlight American Bamboos, by Judziewicz, Clark, Londono & Stern, a book edited by the Smithsonian Press. And, what is most important, she has described for science more than fifty species of Neotropical bamboos. In 1988 she started the largest collection of bamboos in Colombia that includes 75 species from Asia and America. This collection is located at the El Bambusal farm, a portion of the old La Esmeralda farm, inherited from her mother Sofia de la Pava de Londono.

In 2001 at El Bambusal she started a process of change going from conventional agriculture to organic agriculture. Today, in this location, paradise is deployed. The Paradise of Bamboo and Guadua, perhaps the loveliest corner in Quindío, with a thematic park that charms and enthralls.

Together with a group of friends, Ximena established the Colombian Bamboo Society, a non-profit organization she leads and chairs since 1998. She is also the chair of the Colombian Committee for the Standardization of Bamboo-Guadua at ICONTEC and member of the international Bamboo Phylogeny Group led by Dr. Lynn G. Clark.

This woman dedicated to bamboo has received multiple awards and recognitions. Among which it´s worthwhile to highlight the one granted in 2011 as the Woman of Bamboo in Latin America, awarded by the International Network of Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR), and the one received from the Higher University Council of Universidad Nacional de Colombia for her outstanding achievements in research, granted in 2017.

At El Bambusal, Ximena Londono has reenacted life in a different way, in fantastic rows and aisles of Guadua, in a swamp that is out of this world, where the spirit of bamboo sways, hanging from the branches of the Guadua plants, while water gurgles from earth attracted by this giant and quaternary grass that summons hundreds of birds and dozens of mammals and reptiles who have come back to their ancient homestead.

<This text is by Miguel Angel Rojas, from Rojas, M.A. 2017. La Mujer del Bambú. En Así Somos, Comfenalco Quindío, Ed. 115. Pp. 48-49>