Q Our neighbors recently built a second-story addition to their house, and now their upstairs window looks right into our kitchen. I miss being able to walk around my kitchen in my underwear. I want to use bamboo as a screen because I love the look and it would go perfectly with our Japanese maples, but my husband says it's dangerous -- always popping up in the wrong places. Is there any way to plant bamboo safely?

A Bamboo is an ideal plant for ensuring the right to run around a house in one's underwear. The good news is that there are safe ways to plant bamboo. There are also types of bamboo that don't ``pop up in the wrong places.'' It's an easy-to-grow plant whose reputation only recently has started to recover from years of character assassination because of landscape misuse.

It's critical to understand that there are two bamboo types -- running and clumping. Running bamboo requires vigilance in small back yards or against a fence because it can send out new roots a fair distance, suddenly sprouting up in your neighbor's patio. The notorious but beautiful black and golden bamboos (Phyllostachys nigra and Phyllostachys aurea) fall into the runner category -- two that graced, then overran, many a back yard in the 1960s and '70s.

Clumping bamboo is the ``good'' bamboo. It sends out new roots only inches so the plant gets gradually bigger in a clumping manner. This is not a bamboo that will typically sprout up in the middle of a lawn 10 feet away.

Clumping bamboos are now found at many nurseries. One of my favorites, Alphonse Karr bamboo, has striped canes of yellow and green. Mexican Weeping Bamboo has a lovely, graceful habit and a light green leaf, two traits rapidly making it a big hit as a landscape plant.

I don't want to give short shrift to running bamboo. It is hard to match the serene beauty of black bamboo or the thick screening value of golden bamboo. However, running bamboos need barriers. Put them in large pots, set them outside a window, trim off the lower leaves, and you have a vision of beauty to behold.

Galvanized horse troughs work well for creating large, contained tracts of running bamboo, including the enormous timber varieties. To plant bamboo directly in the ground, install a three-foot deep galvanized sheet metal or special bamboo plastic barrier, then cut off any roots that jump out.

When shopping for bamboo, consider the eventual width, height and color of the canes (culms). Check the ``Sunset Western Garden Book'' for this information.