This banana flower first appeared on Thanksgiving Day (US) in 2006

A week later, several bananas had already developed.

In two week’s time, the bananas were pointing skyward, and I was sure we’d be eating bananas by Christmas.

In the third week, we began supporting the tree with a board. Later, because the wind kept blowing the board down, we wrapped a rope around the tree and tied it to another tree in the woods.

Then the plant seemed to go into a trance for a month and little external change was seen, except the flower kept unfurling bracts and dropping them to the ground, so the stalk grew longer.

Finally, on Lincoln’s Birthday, 81 days after the flower appeared, a touch of yellow appeared in the bananas.

The procedure here is to harvest the bananas while they’re green and hang them in a shaded area to ripen. Then you cut down the plant because it will produce no more fruit and its young are already growing. So the deed was done – one blow of the machete for the stalk –

and one blow of the machete for the plant.

(More details at Flckr.)

Now to wait for the ripening!

How do you tell the difference between a plantain and a banana?

It’s pretty straightforward when you walk into a fruit and vegetable stand and see large, green plantains next to smaller, yellow bananas.

Plantains are starchy and are cooked like starches. Bananas can be cooked, too, but the bananas we know from temperate climates are “dessert” bananas and usually are eaten raw.

But it’s not so easy to tell them apart when you look at two adjacent, growing plants, one plantain, the other banana.

In this image, all the plants are banana plants except the two end plants in the middle row. Those are plantain plants.

On closer examination, here’s a plantain plant on the left and a banana plant on the right.

Without going into further detail at the moment, the only difference I can tell between them is their size, which reflects the rate at which they’ve grown. (The angle of the leaves depends on how long ago the leaf unfurled and is not, as far as I know, a distinguishing characteristic.) We planted the bananas about a year ago and the plantains about six months ago. The plantains are already much taller than the bananas.

So what is the difference between plantains and bananas?

These days I turn first to my book, A Guide to Tropical Plants of Costa Rica, for an overview. There I find that both are members of the genus Musa, family Musaceae. There are hundreds of banana forms and cultivars, and there are about 40 wild species of Musa. The plantain is a hybrid of the species M. acuminata and M. balbisiana. The growing banana pictured in that book is M. acuminata, from which the commercial banana was cultivated.

That information tells me that the plants are reliably genetically different, but it doesn’t tell me how to tell which plant is which.

Our local Panamanian friends have educated us in the ways bananas or plantains grow. You obtain a shoot (a “baby”) from a friend who has a banana or plantain plant. The shoot is actually a pseudostem growing from an underground stem or corm. As the original shoot matures, another shoot, or baby, may begin growing from the underground corm.

Eventually the original shoot will produce a flower (an inflorescence, actually) which will produce one stalk of bananas or plantains and then will die. After you harvest your bananas, you cut back the original shoot and wait for the baby shoot to mature.

That information tells me the plants grow in the same way, but it doesn’t tell me how to tell which plant is which.

My book explains to me that the fruits develop without pollination and without seeds, a process called parthenocarpy. This multisyllabic word comes from the Greek parthenos, which means virgin, and karpos, which means fruit. So there is no pollination, no fertilization, no seeds. Yet the plant produces both nectar and male and female flowers.

Those flowers have their own karma. The first 5-15 rows on the stalk are female flowers and these develop into fruit. The next few rows are sterile flowers with abortive male and female parts, and the last rows are flowers with normal stamens but abortive ovaries. These latter types of flower eventually drop off.

That information tells me that the biology and development seems to be so similar for both bananas and plantains that it’s not worth distinguishing, at least on a level suitable for a non-professional botanist.

Some friends have given me some suggestions on how to tell the plants apart – the color of the “trunk” is darker for a banana than for a plantain, there are 3 sides to a plantain but not to a banana, and the stem (petiole) of the leaf is paler for a plantain than for a banana. I’ve examined our plantain/banana side-by-side plants and my poor eyes just cannot find these distinctions, except possibly for a hint of a difference in the shading of the petiole.

So I’m going to have to grow accustomed to the plants, watch them produce year by year, and wait for the subtle differences to show themselves to me. Maybe one day…

I promise not to turn this blog into a banana blog, but the rapid development of this flower continues to astonish me. On day 4, the outermost “leaf” (which I’ve learned is actually a bract) fell to the ground revealing the first row of bananas.

The second bract is lifting and beginning to reveal its own baby bananas.

I’ve had a hard time finding the names of the parts of the banana flower on the internet. However, the Ganesh Mani Pradhan & Son Nursery has come partly to the rescue by creating a nicely illustrated Banana Flower Salad. The salad is served in the flower bracts and a visit to the site is worthwhile simply to see the image of the completed salad.

What intrigues me is that a fully developed stalk of bananas grows “upside down,” with the ends of the bananas pointing to the sky. See the Wikipedia entry for Musa, the genus name of bananas, for an example. Scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page for the stalk. The young flower in our back yard, though, as well as the flower used in the Banana Flower Salad, has the ends of the young bananas pointing to the ground. Will they eventually fold up and point to the sky?

The suspense is killing me.

The first thing I saw out the kitchen window after getting back to Panama was the first flower on any of our banana trees. It was Thanksgiving Day in the United States.

Two days later the flower had already changed.

This morning I noticed one leaf (maybe this is a sepal – I have some banana biology to learn) was separated from the rest of the flower.

When I walked around to the other side to get another view, here’s what I saw:

Juvenile bananas! Three days after the flower dropped down from among the leaves! Here’s a closer view of the bananas and their individual flowers:

To all the banana growers in the tropics, my apologies. This is my first and it’s terribly exciting.

“Consider the banana (Musa). The commercial varieties do not produce seeds, and their culture is limited to isolating sprouts and placing them in favorable ecological conditions. These banana clones are as ancient as tropical agriculture itself, 10,000-20,000 years….To me, the banana…represents an optimal means of immortality….” Francis Hallé: In Praise of Plants.

One of the first things I learned about bananas after moving to a country where they’re grown is that the banana plant is an herb, not a tree. So… that make them immortal? Wow! All right.

Next question.

Does it matter whether bananas retain their “skirts?”

As far as I can tell, a banana leaf has a life span independent of the life span of the plant itself. Once the leaf has “died,” it drops and hangs out near the “trunk” of the banana plant. Is this good or bad?

I’ve yet to find out. Any reports would be greatly appreciated.