Musa varieties sprout appeal

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One place calls it de winterharde bananenboom.

Plant or comedic rimshot? You decide.

Tap-tap, tap-tap, bananenboom!

See what I mean? We could start our own band.

Bananenboom.

I found the Web listing for de winterharde bananenboom at the consonant-laden Penninckx Nurseries in Enghien, Belgium, where directions come with a that-way-is-Paris arrow. And it’s where praises are heaped on a Musa that can’t be ignored: Musa basjoo.

Pronunciation guide, anyone?

Please?

My Musa madness started last week when I thumbed through the Logee’s catalog. The famed Connecticut nursery knew just when to send its book of temptation known as tropical container plants. After a major snowstorm had us hip-deep is just when.

As I salivated over the citrus collection and wondered if I could convince the family it was time to shovel out the front yard and start that sunroom-greenhouse-conservatory, I turned from page five to see my destiny on page seven.

Yep, seven pages in and already I’m in trouble.

There stood Musa basjoo, its frondlike leaves towering over puny, normal plants and baby Musa basjoo that resemble young cornstalks. The description said it grows many feet in a season and will form a large clump that can reach 12 feet in height. The growers’ tip says if you live in Zone 4, just mulch, mulch, mulch with a 3-foot-high-and-wide hay mound for the winter and don’t worry if in the spring the stem is soft and gelatinous.

Eeeeew.

Who wouldn’t want one?

I must be bananas.

Bananenboom.

Yes, dear reader folk, Musa basjoo is the cold-hardy banana, also known as Japanese fiber banana. No, that doesn’t mean a boon to high-fiber dieters everywhere; the bananas are inedible but the plant provides a textile fiber.

Bananas may be the fourth largest fruit crop globally, but in the rest of the world, the banana has numerous other uses.

According to Purdue University’s horticulture Web site, bananas are an ingredient in everything from baby food to beer and wine to a coffee substitute. Parts of the banana plant and the hybrid banana known as plantains are used not only as feed for pigs, beef cattle and chicks but also as fishing line, thatching, cigarette wrappers, shoe soles, floor coverings, handbags and kraft paper. The peel is used in blackening leather – there’s tannin in the peel – and in making soap.

All this and it isn’t even a tree.

Nope, try a really big herb. Below ground level is a rhizome from whence it comes. The “trunk” isn’t even that; it’s a “pseudostem” made of rolled-up, immature leaves, which makes sense since it comes from a rhizome. In warm weather, the leaves unfurl at a rate of one per week.

As to the fruit, it is a berry. The berries grow in clusters and each cluster is a “hand” of bananas.

Recorded banana history goes back to about the 4th century B.C., according to www.foodtimeline.org. This amazingly fun site traces food back to, well, water and moves through the millennia to history-altering things such as chicken-fried steak (1824), banana splits (1904) and beefalo (1957).

Purdue’s site traces bananas’ origins to the Indo-Malaysian region of the world. The plants were being talked about in the Mediterranean region in the 3rd century B.C., but it wouldn’t be until the 10th century A.D. that the plants arrived in Europe. In the 16th century, the Portuguese transported bananas from West Africa to South America. Nearly four centuries later in the 1880s, Americans were introduced to bananas, according to Foodtimeline.org.

If you think you’ve seen one banana, you’ve seen them all, you couldn’t be more erroneous. At a site in Honduras, there are 100 species with more than 470 cultivars in its collection. Many nursery sites for tropical plants sell a wide variety, including the Belgian Penninckx Nurseries, which offers six varieties of Musa basjoo alone.

The varieties are astounding in their differences. African Rhino Horn, a plantain, grows up to 2 feet long and can weigh 2 pounds each. Burmese Blue from Tibet is only about 8 inches long and sports a blue-violet peel and a cylindrical shape that looks more like an eggplant. Ice Cream is said to taste like its name in vanilla. Monkey Fingers hopefully doesn’t taste like its name, which comes from its ability to produce hundreds of fingerlike bananas on a stalk that weighs up to 80 pounds. Then again, maybe it doesn’t taste like its name since its not grown for its fruit, but for its novelty. Another cultivar, William, is a variety that bears the Chiquita name and can produce a bunch that weighs 150 pounds.

Bananas aren’t hard to grow, although they are susceptible to winds. They are heavy feeders and Musa basjoo isn’t an exception. Logee’s, www.logees.com or (888) 330-8038, recommends full sun, although part shade will do, and plenty of water. You could even grow it inside if the mood strikes.

At $9.95, it’s cheap fun. Kind of like a barrel of monkeys.

They should be right at home under my banana pseudostem.

Bananenboom.

Janine Pineo’s e-mail address is jpineo@bangordailynews.net.