Yes! We have hardy bananas
BANANAS are blooming into fruit across Guernsey.
Jaine Dowding contacted the Guernsey Press after reading about another gardener who had also found bananas on their plant for the first time.
Mrs Dowding put in the banana plant in her St Andrew’s garden at least 15 years ago. It cost £14 and was only a few feet high.
‘We have had small flowers before, but they have never developed into bananas,’ she said.
‘I’ve been disappointed that in the years before they never came to anything.’
Helen Litchfield, co-secretary of the La Societe botany section, said it was not that unusual to find these plants producing fruit in Guernsey.
‘This is not the first examples of this we have had. These plants are known as hardy bananas and will even produce fruit in the UK if protected from frost, so they can’t be seen as an indicator of climate change,’ she said.
‘However, the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland have shown how tender plants are emigrating northward, so there is overwhelming evidence that climate change is real.’
Muso Basjoo, known as the hardy banana, is an ornamental banana plant originally from Japan. It is able to produce an inedible fruit when it is three or four years old.
Bananas are self-fertile, meaning that a single tree has both male and female reproductive organs and can pollinate itself.
Mrs Dowding remained unsure of the reasons for her tree’s first fruit.
‘It was dry this year and last year and hot, so it might be a culmination of those two summers.
‘It could be the wet, warm winter,’ she said.
‘It’s all conjecture. It’s hard to say if it’s climate change, but the long periods of dry weather have definitely affected the things you find in the typical English garden.’
She said she had no intention of trying to eat the fruit, which are green and seven or eight centimetres long.
‘I’m pretty sure they are inedible,’ she said.
‘I’m definitely not going to try and eat them anytime soon.’
