Abstract: The tensile and compressive stress-strain relationships of bamboo scrimber were studied in this paper. The uniaxial longitudinal tension and compression tests were carried out to investigate the failure modes and the characteristics of the stress-strain relationships of bamboo scrimber. The results indicate that the tensile failure modes show as brittle tensile failure, and the compressive failure modes show as buckling failure, shearing failure and wedge split failure. According to the test results, the tensile stress-strain relationship of bamboo scrimber is linear until failure, and the compressive stress-strain curves of bamboo scrimber can be divided into three stages:elastic stage, elastic-plastic stage and platform stage. A linear elastic model was suggested for the tensile tress-strain relationship for bamboo scrimber; three models were presented for the compressive tress-strain relationship, namely trilinear model, general model and exponential model.The results indicate that three presented models can describe the three stages of the stress-strain curves of the bamboo scrimber under axial compression. Totally, the predicted results of the proposed models are in good agreement with the experimental results.