QuickCheck: Do bananas grow on trees?

THE banana is a sweet yellow fruit with a thick yellow peel that grows on trees. Is this true?

Verdict:

FALSE

Originating in South-East Asia, the banana is the Malay Archipelago's gift to the world and like many things from our region, it's complicated.

Firstly, although the plant the fruit grows on is commonly referred to as a tree, it is actually categorised as a giant herb which, coincidentally, is related to lilies and orchids.

For something to be botanically defined as a tree, it has to be a perennial plant (meaning it lives for more than two years) that has an elongated woody stem or trunk that holds up branches, have a root system that is tightly bound to the soil and is over 4m tall.

Banana plants (the correct term), on the other hand, while they are perennials, have non-woody stems, no branches and a weak root system making it easy to uproot.

This makes it a really big herb like parsley, sage, rosemary or thyme.

As mentioned earlier, bananas originate from our part of the world so we take for granted the almost innumerable varieties (or cultivars) of the fruit we have to enjoy, while most other countries just have the big yellow Cavendish.

Not only that, if you go into our forests you can actually find wild varieties of the fruit as well in different shapes, sizes and colours, some edible, some not.

Prior to the domination of the Cavendish, there was another cultivar called the Gros Michel (Big Michael).

It was by far the most common species of the fruit to be exported up until the 1950s before it was wiped out almost everywhere by a fungal blight caused by Fusarium oxysporum called the "Panama disease".

The blight was so widespread that banana growers everywhere raced to find a cultivar that was resistant to the disease.

Being the home of the banana, you can still get the Gros Michel here in South-East Asia as it is still grown here. Locally, it's called Pisang Embun or Ambon.

One of the major reasons Gros Michel went extinct everywhere but here, is that commercially grown bananas are clonal plants.

Meaning growers will take cuttings from one plant to grow thousands of individual plants which are clones of each other.

This helps with the consistency of the look and flavour of a fruit but the danger is that the clones will all share the same strengths and weaknesses so it would be very easy for a pathogen to completely wipe out an entire harvest.

This happened with potatoes in Europe back in the mid-1800s causing the Great Famine in Ireland and is happening now with coffee, cacao and, surprise surprise, the Cavendish banana.

References:

1. https://www.rainforest-alliance.org/resource-item/bananas-from-bunch-to-breakfast/

2. https://www.biologyonline.com/dictionary/tree