Pre-packaged by nature

THE golden package split open along the naturally forming seams revealing creamy white goodness packed with a nutritional punch. This fruit – the banana – was likely domesticated in South East or South Asia over 6,500 years ago.
Its domestication is so far in the distant past we can forget that the banana is a seed producing herb (despite its height and tough stem it is not a tree) that has, through the combined efforts of man and nature, come to produce fruits where all that remains of the seeds are tiny black dots in the creamy flesh.

Present day dessert bananas and plantain are naturally occurring sterile hybrids of two wild species: Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana. Bananas are monocotyledons, meaning that the seed produces a single seed leaf and are members of the family Musaceae in the order Zingiberales, of which gingers are also a member.

The roots of the common English name banana may be the Arabic word for finger ‘banan’. It has been speculated that the great plant taxonomist Linnaeus named the banana for Antonio Musa, physician to the Emperor Augustus or adapted from the Arabic word for banana, mauz. However, the names for the varieties of this delicious fruit are as varied as is the delightful fruit.

Think back to your most recent to visit to the market and the stalls hung with bunches of golden fruit ranging from the tiny pisang mas to the gigantic pisang rajah – which is used to make banana chips and banana fritters, to the golden yellow horn-shaped Cavendish banana – which in the temperate areas is the typical variety available, to the red pisang raja udang, to mention a few of the over 50 varieties of domesticated bananas.

In this utopia of nutritious fruit, we may forget Mother Nature’s hand in its development and that wild seed bananas continue to grow untamed. These seedy bananas occasionally make their way to the market; I was, many years ago shocked to bite into this delicious fruit only to be greeted by a mouthful of black seeds!

Most of us are familiar with the delicious goodness of the fruit, but we may not know that the stem can also be used to produce fibres that can be spun into yarn to be woven into cloth or made into speciality paper. Musa textilis, commonly known as Manila hemp, was used in the past, and still is used, to produce ecologically friendly but strong fibres. In Uganda, Africa, banana fibre is wrapped around wire to make unique beads.

Bananas are herbaceous plants, despite often being referred to as banana trees because of their tall, six- to over seven-metre pseudo stem. The stem generally dies back after fruiting, although recently miraculous second fruitings have been highlighted in the newspapers.

A large purple flower, sometimes known as the banana heart, grows from the end of a long stem. The female flowers, from which each banana finger sprouts, appear further up along the stem. The fruit hangs downwards. The fruit, sometimes referred to as a leather berry, splits easily along three sections that correspond to the carpel edges.
Asexual reproduction is the norm. Suckers sprout from the underground stem corn. These can be removed and grown in a sandy medium before being planted out.

At this point you may ask why a plant, which has been domesticated for a very long time, is being featured in a nature column. Well the answer to that is that Mother Nature continues to play a role, not only in providing a growing medium – the soil, sunshine and water – but in dictating which varieties are produced.

The limited genetic variation has left some varieties susceptible to diseases, for example the Panama Disease (Fusarium wilt, a soil fungus which enters through roots and travels via water to the stem and leaves causing them to wilt) decimated plantations of the variety Gros Michael, which was an economically important variety. This variety has been generally replaced by the Cavendish subgroup. Other diseases include Black Sigatoka, a fungal leaf disease impeding photosynthesis, which has been identified in the South Pacific, and Banana Bunchy Top (generally causes infected plants not to produce fruits), which is a virus that jumps between plants via aphids.

Although we think of domestication as a human activity, the natural hybridisation on the part of nature provided the seeds for the development of this widely consumed plant. In addition, the monoculture production of the plant lends itself to the spread of diseases – forces of nature – Mother Nature.