A Neotropical Savanna

Note for banana development updates: I’m posting daily images with notes at Flickr. You can get there by clicking at the link under the Flickr images in the right hand column of this page.

One of the first phenomena I noticed after moving to the tropics was the appearance in the rainy season of red-colored young leaves. As the leaves aged, the red disappeared and the leaves became green. Here, for instance, is a young avocado mango plant putting out new leaves:

Why? I wondered.

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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.

The first thing I saw out the kitchen window after getting back to Panama was the first flower on any of our banana trees. It was Thanksgiving Day in the United States.

Two days later the flower had already changed.

This morning I noticed one leaf (maybe this is a sepal – I have some banana biology to learn) was separated from the rest of the flower.

When I walked around to the other side to get another view, here’s what I saw:

Juvenile bananas! Three days after the flower dropped down from among the leaves! Here’s a closer view of the bananas and their individual flowers:

To all the banana growers in the tropics, my apologies. This is my first and it’s terribly exciting.

Remember those curved Senna pistils that are destined to become beans?

Here are the young beans, starting to grow on the Senna tree that flowered first this season.

[I've been in the U.S. for the past three weeks. I'd intended to post this image with a note to the effect that I'd be away, but I didn't get it done. Came back to find a banana plant in flower. About that tomorrow.]