Sharon True Coulson, age 13, , 0ttawa, Canada, for her question:

How tall is a banana tree?

A tree lives from year to year and produces a new crop of seeds with every season. The banana plant produces only one harvest and then dies. It is really a herb, though it grows as big as a tree. It takes a little more than a year to grow from a rootstock to its full size and prepare a cluster of perhaps 180 delicious, canary yellow bananas,

The banana plant looks somewhat like a palm. When full grown, its trunk may be 30 feet, as tall as five tall men standing on each other's heads. The sturdy column may be 16 inches wide and the top will be crowned with perhaps 20 bright green leaves, each two feet wide and twelve feet long. Smaller banana varieties may be 15 feet tall with trunks eight inches wide.