The banana plant has no trunk and is technically a giant herb
What looks like a banana tree is the largest herbaceous flowering plant on Earth, standing on a false stem of tightly rolled leaf sheaths. Its seedless fruit is botanically a berry. And because commercial bananas cannot set seed, breeding new varieties to fight diseases like Panama disease is extremely difficult.
Bananas come from several large plants in the genus Musa. Nearly all seedless eating bananas trace back to just two wild ancestors, Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana, alone or crossed. The genus is native to tropical Indomalaya and Australia and was probably domesticated in New Guinea. In some countries starchy cooking types are called plantains to separate them from sweet dessert bananas. Carl Linnaeus named the genus in 1753, perhaps after Antonius Musa, physician to Emperor Augustus, or perhaps adapting the Arabic mauz.
The anatomy surprises. Everything above ground sprouts from an underground corm, and the apparent trunk is a pseudostem built from overlapping leaf-stalk sheaths, which alone hold the plant up. The sheathing leaves can grow up to 1.6 metres in a day. Fruit forms from the banana heart in a hanging bunch of about nine tiers, called hands, each with up to 20 fingers, and a whole bunch may weigh 22 to 65 kilograms. The strings you peel away are vascular bundles running between skin and flesh.
Research in 2024 by Li and colleagues traced the three genome sets of triploid cultivated bananas largely to three subspecies of M. acuminata. The Cavendish, the main banana eaten in the West, is one such triploid, and that genetic uniformity makes it vulnerable. Panama disease, caused by a Fusarium fungus, and black sigatoka both threaten it, so gene banks around the world conserve banana germplasm for future breeding.
Bananas grow in 135 countries, and in 2022 India and China together produced about 26 percent of the world's crop. Besides fruit eaten raw or cooked in curries, fritters and chips, the plants yield paper and textiles. A cousin in the genus Ensete, the so-called false banana, is an economically important crop in Africa.
Source: Banana
