My Experience Growing Banana Plants
2020 saw us plunged into an unprecedented situation, leading to the first lockdown my generation has experienced. It’s been a terrible time for many if not most of us. Home working, initially at least, left many workers with a great deal of time on their hands. And for others (such as myself and my immediate colleagues) there was no change to our workload or agenda, it simply meant we didn’t have an arduous commute to the office each day. Clawing back the travelling time gave me the opportunity to make an effort in the garden. Despite always having a love of plants, up until relatively recently I hadn’t started to plan my garden beyond keeping the weeds at bay.
It can be hard to know where to start, if you like so many plants and so many styles of garden. I love wild meadow gardens based around grasses, but I also love lush tropical gardens. Then there are the Japanese gardens I admire so much, and the formal gardens I see when I visit country houses in the UK. Where to begin?! My wife has conceded the garden to me, knowing that whatever she suggests may fall on deaf ears. She’s a dab hand with interiors (in fact our modest home was featured in a couple of well-known interior magazines several years ago). But beyond an enjoyment of gardens, and having a natural leaning towards design, my wife doesn’t get involved in actual gardening. Arthritis and RSI has put paid to hands-on input, though she does ask some fairly pertinent questions at times. She’s also something of a minimalist, meaning she and I don’t always agree on the direction I take with planting - I have a tendency to over stock.
I decided to start by indulging myself in the plants I was immediately drawn to, and to give it a year in which time I would hopefully develop a definite leaning towards one style or another. This helped me to realise that I have a love of large architectural plants and I knew I would want to include these somewhere in the garden. I had a bit of a disaster when I tried to grow Echium Pininana, and I still haven’t fully ascertained why they died. I’m going to have another go with those, but in the meantime my love of banana plants got the better of me. If you weren’t aware, Banana plants are actually herbs and distantly related to Ginger plants, albeit many informally refer to them as trees.
I live in Storrington, in West Sussex. We have some fantastic nurseries close by, such as The Big Plant Nursery at Ashington, and Architectural Plants in between Pulborough and Billingshurst. Once I’d decided on the bananas I wanted to grow (Musa basjoo and Musa sikkimensis ‘Red Tiger’) I ordered some specimens at around 50 cm in height.
Banana Plants ….
Watching each new leaf unfurl is fascinating, and it’s a quick process too, happening almost before your eyes on the warmer days. I was pleased with how well this Red Tiger fitted into my existing planting scheme (although I’ll be giving it a bit more room this season).
Red Tiger ….
I was absolutely shocked by how quickly this plant grew - at one point I was recording growth rates of around 4 inches per 24 hours!
As the Red Tiger grows, the stripes become darker and slightly less distinct. It’s a magnificent specimen to have in any garden and adds an exotic, lush feel.
Why did I choose these variants? Red Tiger is exotic, colourful, and one of the few that is quite tolerant of the cold. Originating from the foothills of the Himalayas may explain this somewhat. That said, it does benefit from being wrapped for the winter. Wrapping means that the plant has a better starting point when unveiled before the summer. If you don’t wrap your bananas, then the plant has to regrow from base level. Banana trees prefer a sunny position, being from the Tropics.
If you do decide to wrap your banana plant as I did at the end of October, then for me this entailed cutting the upright pseudo stem (or pseudo stems in my case) down to around 4ft and then removing all the leaves. The leaves would have died anyway when the cold and frost got to them. I then cut them up and spread them around the base of the plant. The next step was to build an approximate 5.5 to 6ft cage around the pseudo stems, which I did using a section from a roll of chicken wire. I tied the chicken wire together with garden ties and pegged it into the ground with steel tent pegs. Once I had done this I filled the whole cage with straw from a bale I had ordered a month or so beforehand. I then proceeded to wrap the outside of the cage with garden plant fleece. Again, I had ordered a roll a month or so prior to this and had popped it away in the loft. I then tied the fleece up with string to keep it secure.
A wrapped Banana plant ….
This is a fully protected banana plant, and I can’t wait to unwrap it soon. As I mentioned, this stage isn’t absolutely essential, but it means your banana plants will have a head start with the trunk preserved. The structure is approximately 4 feet high.
Finally, I popped a small thin tarpaulin over the top of the structure and secured that in place. This last step was to stop the cold winter rain and snow from soaking into the top of what was now a somewhat odd looking “cigar or fat cigarette” like structure. I’ll be looking to perform the unveiling in early May, when I can be sure that the last frosts have passed. It will be interesting to see how successful I’ve been in protecting the stems. If I haven’t though, for whatever reason, then the plant will just have to start growing from the ground up again. One thing I can be sure of is that it will continue to get well fed and watered.
I mentioned the Musa basjoo banana plant earlier. This is also a Japanese hardy banana which, in optimal conditions, can flower and bear small but inedible bananas. It’s important to say that the term ‘hardy’ means that the root structure will survive in the ground over winter but the upright growth (the pseudo stem or false leaf ‘trunk’) is best protected with hessian or fleece. As with the Red Tiger, if you don’t decide to wrap it up then this means the plant will start off where it finished in the previous autumn. However, you will need to try and put as much natural insulation over the underground part of the plant e.g. a huge pile of organic matter, such as leaves, parts of the cut down banana itself etc. This is to protect it from persistent hard frost and very low temperatures which could kill the plant if it is not given at least a degree of thermal protection.
I feed my banana plants with plenty of mulch and organic manure at least every two weeks if not more, from spring through to late summer. They are very thirsty plants and in mid-Summer I can find myself giving them up to 2-3 gallons of water a day. Something you don’t appear to be able to do with an actively growing banana plant, is over water it. I am not sure whether this is a good thing or not!
One of the things which astounded me when I started growing banana plants was their growth rate. I would measure the height at the same time every 24 hours, and at the peak of growth in early to mid-summer I was recording as much as 4 inches per day on each new leaf!