Banana

Description:

Banana trees grow from an underground root system called a corm, which can last for many years. Each corm sends up one or more shoots, which develop large leaves. The thick stalks of these leaves wrap around each other and thicken into the trunk of the banana “tree.” A central stem comes up through the leaf stalks and develops the banana “heart,” which is a structure that includes multiple small flowers, each of which has an ovary that develops into a banana. Once the bananas have ripened, the entire plant dies back to the ground, and the corm sends up a new shoot. Even though a banana plant can get to be over 7.5 meters tall (25 feet), it only lasts about a year or so. And the interior of it is not a structure of dead cells as with wood. So a banana “tree” is not technically a woody tree.

Habitat:

Town on Tortola, BVI

Notes:

A banana plant is technically a large herb, distantly related to ginger. It is considered an herb in botanical terms because it never forms a woody stem the way a tree does. Rather, it forms a succulent stalk, or pseudostem. It is believed that the earliest written reference to banana is in Sanskrit and dates back to around 500 BC. Bananas are suspected to be the first fruit in the earth by some horticulturists. Their origin is placed in Southeast Asia, in the jungles of Malaysia, Indonesia or Philippines, where many varieties of wild bananas still grow today. Africans are credited to have given the present name, since the word banana would be derived from the Arab for ‘finger’.