Joan Martan, age 12, of Lancaster, Pa., for her question:
How do you start a banana tree?
Every year some 50 million big bunches of beautiful bananas arrive in the United States. They look like fat green thumbs and fingers, but after a while they ripen to their familiar golden yellow. Some of them will be eaten with breakfast cereals, some will be made into pies, some will add their tasty flavor to ice cream and other treats.
The banana has a delicious flavor, and there are dozens of ways we can eat it. After we take off the dustproof, germproof peel and enjoy the mealy pulp, we may wonder about its seeds. Most fruits have seeds inside their tasty pulp, but the banana seems to have no seeds at all. Since new plants come from seeds, it is natural to wonder what part of the fruit is used to start a new banana tree.
The truth of the matter is that new banana trees are not started from the fruit or from seeds. The banana tree is unlike most of our common fruit trees in this and in several other ways. In the first place, its tall trunk is not really a trunk. It is a sheath of furled leaf stems, each one ending in a spreading frond. The main stem of the plant may be a foot wide at its base and may grow 10 to 25 feet tall. But unlike such trees as the apple and peach, it is not supported by a firm wooden trunk.
Most fruit trees take years to reach their full height, and they bear their fruit season after season. The banana is fully grown in 12 to 15 months. All of its growing must be done in this short period, and for such fast growth the tree must have a hot, wet climate. It cannot survive frost or drought.
If you wish to start a banana tree that will yield a crop of bananas you must go to the warm, wet tropics. Your tree would grow outdoors in Equador or Honduras, Panama and several other countries of Central America. Bananas also are grown successfully in the West Indies and many parts of warm, wet Asia. You would not start your new plant from seeds, but from shoots. As it matures, a tree sprouts a number of leafy shoots from its base. When the old tree dies these youngsters grow up to take its place. Young shoots can be removed from the parent tree and replanted. This is how you would start a new tree, and it is the method used by banana growers to Establish new plantations.
When the tree reaches its full height a long stem grows from its crown of leaves and dips downward. This stem ends in a huge pendant of folded purple leaves. These leaves unfurl to reveal clusters of small blossoms. Some of the flowerets develop into bananas, and soon the drooping stem is clustered with rows and rows of little green fingers.