How stuff grows: Banana Day Repost

Well that's just silly.

Bananas actually grow on plants that look suspiciously like trees and grow 3-6 meters (10–20 feet) tall, some wild varieties even up to 15 meters (50 feet).

And while they look like trees, they're secretly the world’s largest herb. Of course they are.

Instead of a wooden trunk they have a fake stem made up of overlapping leaf sheaths. Each individual banana plant grows out of a bulbous base called a corm and produces exactly one big bunch of fruit before it dies down and a new shoot out of the corm takes its place.

If you were to strip banana plants of all their leafy bits, they would look like this:

This pic was called „naked banana plants“, by the way. You’re welcome.

Those already have fruit, though, so to get to that stage the plant first had to grow a big, bent-over flower spike from the top of its stem. The big purple thing below is the so-called banana heart, made up of bracts (specialized leaves) protecting lots of small yellow flowers that are arranged in tiers:

And it’s those little individual flowers that grow into individual bananas. Which are botanically berries, by the way. Of course they are.

As they grow, bananas start curving upwards (that’s what she said!), taking on their typical bent shape:

And here’s what all the parts are called (this is where you find out that you've been using "a bunch of bananas" wrong all your life):

The more you know!

There are up to 1,000 cultivated banana varieties, and bananas can range in size from really tiny...

...to really big...

...and in color from yellow, green and brown to, well:

Yeah.

The Internationally Accepted Banana of Internet Measurement, however, is a very specific one - the Cavendish:

The Cavendish accounts for practically all of the worldwide banana export market and around half of all bananas cultivated worldwide (which also tells you that people in tropical countries eat a LOT of entirely different kinds of bananas ‒ most of them plantains, actually ‒ than we do in Europe and North America and probably scoff at our non-existent banana selection).

Interestingly, had the internet been around before 1950, the international scale banana would have been the „stereotypical export banana“ of that time, the Gros Michel:

But Gros Michel was decimated by Panama disease and growers had to find a new, more resistant variety. Enter the Cavendish.

Don’t get too attached to it, though. It, too, is vulnerable to a specific strain of Panama disease ‒ one which made its first appearence in the Americas just two years ago.

It doesn't help that today's Cavendish bananas are practically all clones of each other. To retain the qualities desired by the world market they're propagated not by letting the bees & birds do their thing, but by splitting up the corms, thus producing genetically identical Reliable Supermarket Bananas. In other words, a veritable banquet for disease.

Aww, poor Cavvy. :(

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I thought why not dust off the (slightly revised) bit about bananas from my "How Stuff Grows" posts for today's National Banana Day.

Here's all the posts in their entirety (the bananas are in Vol. 4, but that one also has the Horrifying Jabuticaba as well as the Coolest Nut Ever (and who cares if it's not a real nut anyway), so just skip the banana part):

Vol. 1: https://imgur.com/gallery/Sa2qVJQ
Vol. 2: https://imgur.com/gallery/1f1JZM4
Vol. 3: https://imgur.com/gallery/L7uuuTm
Vol. 4: https://imgur.com/gallery/LcqzWqO
Vol. 5: https://imgur.com/gallery/a9JyTgq
Vol. 6: https://imgur.com/gallery/rQafyGD
Vol. 7: https://imgur.com/gallery/XaDGEOD
Vol. 8: http://imgur.com/gallery/7HL4A6t