SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Sean Bigley knows bamboo can be scary, the stuff of backyard nightmares.

Like something out of a horror movie, the world's fastest-growing plant can creep along underground and pop up uninvited, again and again and again. One little root can sprout a forest. Bamboo can swallow up space and make the rest of the backyard simply … disappear.

"Bamboo has this reputation," Bigley says. "It can go crazy and get out of control. I'm working to change that concept of bamboo as an instant nightmare."

In bamboo, the Rocklin, Calif., resident has found instead a gardener's dream of easy-care beauty. Bigley fell in love with bamboo's versatility and variety, from tiny pygmy miniatures nested in pots to majestic giants more than 100 feet tall. Most are drought-tolerant, too.

Bamboo is gaining fans for its fast growth and good looks. It has become a favorite for privacy screens and thick hedges, and for quickly covering ugly walls, even with little sun or water. Bamboo thrives where other plants never take root.

And that runaway reputation? Those are running varieties, Bigley points out, not their less-aggressive clumping cousins.

"I keep all my running varieties in containers," he says. "That solves the problem. If you're going to grow running varieties, you need to go in with your eyes wide open."

Bamboo canes — or culms, as they're properly called — come in a rainbow of colors, including outrageous stripes.

"Most people think of bamboo as green," Bigley explains, "but it can come in gold, white, red, orange, blue, gray — even black."

Bigley, an avowed bamboo geek who works for the city of Roseville, Calif. — has almost 100 varieties growing in his suburban yard, coexisting comfortably with Japanese maples and other Asian-theme plants.

He now has his own bamboo nursery, too. He started Mad Man Bamboo as a way to reach out to other bamboo lovers and thin out his own collection."I told him if he was going to keep buying more bamboo, he needed to start selling it, too," says his wife, Christy Bigley. "It's scary out there in our yard, like our own jungle. … But I love it, too."

After opening the nursery in 2005, the Bigleys learned how big the world of bamboo is. With thousands of years of cultivation history, bamboo has collectors worldwide as well as everyday gardeners who have fallen for its tropical look.

Bamboo collectors can spend up to $1,000 for a single clump of the rarest varieties, with canes that resemble tortoise shell. Most plants come from divisions; the plants flower only once every 50 to 100 years.