A quick note to any regular readers: Sorry about my no-show yesterday. I took a snow day. Second, wow!: this is a snowy season. All the more reason we should wish we were all on a tropical island right now. Eating bananas.
So, with banana daiquiris and sandy beaches on the mind, today's post is on the banana, or Musa. Now, I won't dare assign a species name to this plant. Most bananas (or plantains) are derivative from M. acuminata or M. balbisiana. So much so that cultivar names are as specific as one can hope to be when deriving the nomenclature of a banana.
The genus is fascinating, however. Though it can get quite tall, it is not a tree. Instead, Musa is always a herbaceous stalk. More specifically, the "trunk" of banana trees is actually a set of fused petioles, or a pseudostem. It's also considered by many to be an annual -- after flowering the stalk will die and a new stalk (or pseudostem) grows in its place.
The leaves are, obviously, enormous. When I was a kid in Malaysia, I remember we would go to a restaurant where, in lieu of plates, our food was served on the thick, leathery banana leaves that were abundant in the region. (In fact, Musa is best suspected to be native to Southeast Asia, though with most tropical plants, tracing back its ancestry is difficult.)
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