Banana Plants (Musa, Ensete, Musella)

Welcome to Plant Delights Nursery at Juniper Level Botanic Gardens. We are a private research and display botanic garden located near Raleigh, North Carolina (USDA Hardiness Zone 7b). Our retail mail order division allows us to make the best perennials from our trials available to gardeners around the world, some of which were developed here, some from our plant explorations, and others from breeders around the world. Between 1988 and 2010, Plant Delights Nursery introduced over 500 new perennial plants to US horticulture. In 2002, we were honored to be recognized by the American Horticulture Society for our lifetime of work in commercial horticulture. This image gallery is but a sampling of the great perennial plants available for gardeners around the world. We do not carry all plants pictured at any one time, but since our mission is to educate and inspire, we hope these images and the linked articles below will expand your garden horizons and interest. You will find an array of other interesting information and fascinating perennials throughout our website...thank you for taking time to visit.

Banana Plant (Musa, Ensete, Musella)

Apeeling Plants for the Garden

By Dennis Carey and Tony Avent
Plant Delights Nursery Inc.
9241 Sauls Road
Raleigh, NC 27603
919.772.4794


Musa sikkimensis

"Yes, we have no bananas", is something said by many temperate zone gardeners. Yet it does not have to be so. Some bananas are hardier than you might think, since gardeners in the United States can grow many cultivars outdoors with just a little protection. There are several bananas that are even cold hardy into and north of USDA Hardiness Zone 7. Regardless of your climate, you can always enjoy bananas in containers or as tender perennials. If you crave amazing, tropical, bold-textured foliage and exotic flowers in your garden (plus perhaps some edible fruit), you should try growing a banana...you just might develop a taste for them. We urge our readers to visit the gardens here at Juniper Level during our Open House Days in order to see our collection...summer and fall open houses are when the bananas are at their peak. We hope this article will prompt you to bring a little tropicality into your garden!

Our focus is bananas that are reliably winter-hardy in Zone 7b (average winter minimum temperature of 5 degrees F). To this end, we trial as many species and cultivars as possible, looking for those that prove to be reliable garden candidates.

History and Background of Bananas

Banana "trees" are tropical herbaceous perennials (not real trees) in the family Musaceae, although the game of rearranging plant families continues as we learn more about plant relationships from DNA testing. The family Musaceae is closely related to other well known ornamental tropicals such as Bird-of-Paradise (Strelitziaceae), Canna Lily (Cannaceae), the tropical gingers (Zingiberaceae) and Heliconia (Heliconaceae). Within the family Musaceae, there are 3 genera of bananas; Ensete, Musa, and Musella .

Bananas are native to Southeast Asia, China, Madagascar and Africa. Forty million years ago, bananas were also native to North America as far north as Oregon, so they certainly should be included in your native plant garden. In the wild, bananas range from low equatorial elevations to high altitudes in the tropics, where we find the cold tolerant species.

Although bananas have been cultivated as a food for 4,000 - 10,000 years in tropical areas, Europeans were not aware of the fruit until they started exploring the world during the Age of Discovery in the 1500s. Edible bananas were not introduced to America until 1876 during the Philadelphia World Exposition. Today, there are several hundred cultivars of edible bananas grown around the world, but since the 1960s, only one cultivar has been used to produce the yellow dessert bananas eaten in the U.S. and Europe; Musa acuminata 'Cavendish'. The 'Cavendish' banana is a sterile triploid, which means it produces fruit in the absence of pollination (parthenocarpy) and therefore does not have any seeds. Most edible bananas belong to Musa acuminata or Musa balbisiana (or are hybrids between the two). These hybrids are given the species name Musa 'paradisiaca'.

In addition to the sweet dessert varieties, there are starchy, unsweet cooking bananas that are used in a manner similar to how Americans use potatoes. These cooking bananas are sometimes known as plantains and are commonly boiled, baked, or fried. Musa and Ensete may be eaten in other ways too. The Chinese eat the immature male flower and many cultures use the rhizomes and the stem as food or animal fodder. Bananas may also be dried and eaten as a chip or ground into flour. Bananas are the fourth largest fruit crop in the world behind apples, citrus, and grapes and are a staple food in some parts of the world.

The era of the 'Cavendish' banana may be coming to an end. Over the last few years, a fungal pathogen called Panama disease (Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense) Tropical Race 4 has evolved that attacks and kills 'Cavendish' plants. It has wiped out 'Cavendish' in almost all of Asia. There is no known preventative or cure and it spreads extremely quickly. If the fungus ever reaches Central America, the monoculture 'Cavendish' farms that supply the U.S. will be decimated. Ironically it was a different race of the same disease that allowed the 'Cavendish' to become so popular in the first place. 'Cavendish' replaced the sweeter and larger 'Gros Michael' banana in the 1950s which was also wiped out by a race of Panama disease. There is currently no replacement for the 'Cavendish' banana that is tolerant of Panama disease and has the all the traits that American consumers demand. The next best choice is a cultivar called 'Goldfinger' which is not as sweet and has a slight tart-apple flavor. However, the best long term solution is not to replace a single monoculture crop with another monoculture crop, but rather to adopt the sustainable practice of growing and eating multiple cultivars of banana.

Bananas also have non-food uses. Ensete and Musa banana stems and leaves are used for their fibers. The coarse fibers are called "manilla hemp" and are used to make paper and rope. The fine fibers are used to make high quality cloth called banana cloth. Banana leaves are waterproof and are often used to wrap food for storage or cooking. The Fehi group of bananas, grown in Polynesia, are used to make a red dye (that will turn your urine red if you eat them). Bananas are used by certain cultures to treat medical disorders such as bronchitis, ulcers, diabetes, hemorrhoids (don't ask me how!), and diarrhea among other things. Central Americans collect the sap of the red banana and take it as an aphrodisiac, although this may be a "phallacy", while the Hindus regard the plant as a symbol of fertility and place the leaves and fruits on the doorstep of newlyweds. In the 1960s it was popular to smoke banana peel for its alleged hallucinogenic affects (what didn't they smoke back then?) but the original newspaper story (The Berkeley Barb, March 1967) that reported this fad was a hoax that fooled the nation.

Bananas are such an important and profitable food crop that the companies that produce them (primarily United Fruit Company, known today as Chiquita and the Standard Fruit Company, known today as Dole) have grown extremely powerful. Their influence on Central American politics has lead to the term "Banana Republic" (coined by the author O. Henry in his 1904 book Cabbages and Kings) which is a pejorative term for a small, unstable, country run by wealthy, corrupt elites who support the exploitation of people and land for cheap banana production by taking bribes and kickbacks from the banana companies. Hmmm...large companies influencing public policy. Good thing that could never happen in the US.

Banana Taxonomy

Depending on who you ask, the genus Musa contains 42-60 species while Ensete contains 6-8 species. The genus Musella is monotypic (has only one species). Musella lasiocarpa had been bounced around between Musa and Ensete before getting its own genus in the 1970s. The taxonomy of the family is poorly resolved due to its worldwide cultivation and hybridization by humans over the last 4000+ years. Only 12 species (with a few dozen cultivars) of Musaceae are cold tolerant enough to be used in temperate gardens. Our choices here in the US are limited, but there are some beautiful options to choose from...



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