I promise not to turn this blog into a banana blog, but the rapid development of this flower continues to astonish me. On day 4, the outermost “leaf” (which I’ve learned is actually a bract) fell to the ground revealing the first row of bananas.

The second bract is lifting and beginning to reveal its own baby bananas.
I’ve had a hard time finding the names of the parts of the banana flower on the internet. However, the Ganesh Mani Pradhan & Son Nursery has come partly to the rescue by creating a nicely illustrated Banana Flower Salad. The salad is served in the flower bracts and a visit to the site is worthwhile simply to see the image of the completed salad.
What intrigues me is that a fully developed stalk of bananas grows “upside down,” with the ends of the bananas pointing to the sky. See the Wikipedia entry for Musa, the genus name of bananas, for an example. Scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page for the stalk. The young flower in our back yard, though, as well as the flower used in the Banana Flower Salad, has the ends of the young bananas pointing to the ground. Will they eventually fold up and point to the sky?
The suspense is killing me.