Things in the plant world are not always what they seem. Sometimes a vegetable is a fruit, a berry is not a berry, and a tree is something else entirely. Pat found out recently that a banana “tree” isn’t a tree and brought it to the attention of the garden club. The plant on which the banana grows is an herb. Botanically, an herb is a plant without a woody stem whose above-ground parts are not permanent. The trunk of the banana plant that resembles the trunk of a tree consists of tightly packed and overlapping leaf stems. These would be the petioles on regular leaves. It can reach a height of 10 to 20 feet. The leaves of the plant each emerge from one of these petioles. Each leaf can reach a length of between 10-11..5 feet in length.

The banana itself is a berry. A berry begins with a flower that has a single ovary. Once fertilized it becomes a fruit with a relatively thin skin and an interior of soft flesh in which the seeds are embedded. All berries are fruits but all fruits are not berries. A fruit is the ripened ovary of a flower that contains seeds. It may have a fleshy or dry interior. A nut is a fruit with an edible seed rather than an interior that can be eaten. A watermelon is a berry but a strawberry is not. A strawberry is an aggregate fruit. A strawberry is formed from a flower that has multiple ovaries. The many seeds come from these ovaries. The fleshy part of the strawberry is formed from the receptacle, the bottom green part of the flower from which the sepals and petals emerge. It is an aggregate of many fruits. This is also true of raspberries and blackberries.

Bananas sold in grocery stores do not have viable seeds. This is because they have been hybridized to be sterile or seedless. Mankind has been enjoying and trading bananas since around 600 BC. While not the first fruit to be carried around the world from its origin in the Malaya Peninsula, Indonesia, the Philippines, and New Guinea they come close. Historians believe the honor of first fruit-hood goes to the fig. These historical bananas do not resemble the modern banana. There are over 70 types of wild bananas that are recognized by botanists. They tend to be small and full of hard black seeds. The colors vary. The skins tend to be much thicker than modern bananas. Some are more edible than others.

Long before Grego Mendel and his theory Mother Nature began modifying the banana. The beginnings of the modern banana occurred around 650 AD. It is believed that Musa acuminata and Musa baalbisiana crossed. The former is a banana, albeit a wild one, and the latter is a plantain. The former contributed to the desirable taste of the banana and the latter to vigor and tolerance to stress. At some point, these crosses and recrosses produced a seedless banana.

In 1836 a Jamaican planter, Jean Francois Puojot, found a banana in Martinique that was softer, sweeter, and had a yellow skin. It had been brought to the island by French naturalist Nicolas Boudin, who may or may not have known that it was something different. Puojot took it back to Jamaica, where it was widely cultivated. Known as the Martinique banana, this variety was soon to be marketed as Gros Michel (aka “Big Mike”). This was the banana that dominated the export trade for many years. It had thick skin, and the fruit was densely packed on the stock, making it ideal for shipping. It was seedless, and this characteristic and the way it was propagated led to its demise due to disease. The banana plant grows from a rhizome. All of the plants of a given variety are genetically identical. The banana plant grows to maturity, produces one stock of bananas, and dies. New plants known as pups grow up from the rhizome. These are the source of the next crop. Unfortunately, Gros Michel was susceptible to Panama disease, a form of Fusarium wilt that came close to wiping it out. The lack of genetic diversity made it impossible for any of the plants to resist the disease, and by the 1950s it became apparent that the reign of Big Mike as the commercial front-runner was over.

The demise of Gros Michel led to the current market favorite, the Cavendish banana. Unable to rid the soil of the fungus that was killing off Gros Michel, growers were forced to find a banana that had some resistance to Panama disease. While it was generally agreed that this banana was not as tasty, nor did it have as creamy a texture as Gros Michel, it did have a resistance to Panama disease. It was also ideal for shipping, ripened slowly, and was attractive to consumers. All of the bananas found in the supermarket are of this variety. By the 1990s a form of Panama disease appeared in the Cavendish strain of bananas. As it takes a year or more for the symptoms to appear in the plants, the soil and everything around the growing area is contaminated by the spores of the fungus before the plants begin to die. There is no cure and growers are resorting to stopgap measures and prayer. Bananas are again in crisis.