Selby Gardens is featured weekly on ABC7 News at Noon. Tune in Thursdays to see more informative segments like this one.
featuring David Troxell, Botany Volunteer
South Palm Avenue runs right through Selby Gardens’ campus. There are few things planted on the Gardens’ perimeter by the street that are a sure bet to draw attention and attract photographers. The most popular of these may be fruiting bananas. Everybody knows what the fruit looks like, and most people have a pretty good idea of what a banana plant looks like. But for someone living in a temperate zone, there is just nothing comparable to the sight of a stalk of bananas hanging off the plant.
Musa is a genus of more than 50 tropical monocot tree-like plants, important for food, fiber, and ornamentals. The genus, now grown in wet tropical areas worldwide, includes bananas and plantains—the fourth most cultivated food crop in the world. Bananas and plantains derive from the same species, but vary in proportion of sugar to starch. Cultivars with high sugar are called bananas, and eaten fresh or cooked when green; those with high starch (plantains and cooking bananas) are eaten only after cooking. Both are high in carbohydrates, fiber, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, and several vitamins. Bananas are eaten fresh, pureed for baby food, and cooked in diverse dishes typical of tropical cuisines. Fruits, leaves, and stems have numerous traditional medicinal uses, including treating dysentery, diarrhea, and digestive disorders (see Morton 1987).
Although many people call these plants “trees,” they’re really not. A tree makes wood and branches, and bananas make neither. Plants have areas of growth, known by gardeners as “buds,” where all new tissue development takes place. Trees and shrubs will have hundreds or thousands of buds, whereas bananas and palms have one bud per stem. They grow on a spiral pushing out leaf after leaf, first curled up and vertical, then unfurling and falling down in a whorl. Unlike palms, who have the bud at the top of the stem where the leaves emerge, bananas have their buds underground. When you cut a stemmed palm down at the base, that stem dies because you have removed the bud. When you cut a banana down, it keeps growing on a spiral from the cut. In order to remove a banana, you need to dig them out. They have a large energy-storage organ, known as a corm, under the ground, which also contains the buds. Think of it like a giant potato. It looks just like one.
Bananas are obligate tropicals and they are essentially giant herbs. In other words, they stand erect because they’re pressurized with water, so they need a lot of it to thrive. They can’t handle long-term flooding, so good drainage is essential. Also, because they’re filled with water, bananas can’t take a freeze; the water expands in their cell walls, exploding, and turning the plants into goomjk. In areas where the ground doesn’t freeze, the plants will re-emerge from the underground corm. In temperate zones where the ground does freeze, the corms can be dug up and overwintered inside. It takes longer than a year to get from a bare corm to a fruiting banana plant, so most bananas grown outside of the tropics are grown as ornamentals. Not only is the plant’s foliage super tropical, but there are many cultivars that are grown for their vivid colors and striking patterns.
So whether it’s a delicious dwarf cultivar in the corner of a vegetable garden, or an ornamental red banana on the edge of a koi pond, nothing quite matches the tropical look of a banana, and there are few edible plants so easy to grow in our area. We hope we inspired you to try growing bananas in your own garden. We look forward to seeing you, in the Gardens.