Top bananas

Some 'pseudo' bananas are grown for their beauty, while others are transforming lives overseas, as Toby explains

-  Toby

SOME things about bananas are just bananas! They look like trees but are, in fact, herbs with soft, fleshy ‘pseudo stems’ that die after bearing fruit, to be replaced by new stems that grow from the base.

Then there’s the fact that most commercially grown bananas originate from a single plant discovered in Vietnam in the early 19th century. This is the ‘Cavendish’ which, through cuttings and taking cuttings of the cuttings, has been planted so widely through the tropics it accounts for all the bananas in our supermarkets.

But the seedless ‘Cavendish’ isn’t the only type. On a recent visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, I was taken around the refurbished Temperate House by tropical crop ecologist James Burrell, and he showed me the giant Abyssinian banana or enset (Ensete ventricosum) which is just as remarkable.

In Ethiopia, farmers use every part of this plant, feeding the fleshy leaf stalks to cattle, using the fibrous outsides of the stems to make cord, and using the leaves for wrapping food.