A Weekly Dose of Nature 🌿

Where nature tells the story.

 

We took this photo at the National Museum of Costa Rica in San José.

Among the tropical plants in the museum’s garden, this one immediately caught our attention: a large, deep purple-red blossom hanging beneath a developing bunch of bananas.

Bananas are such a familiar sight that most of us hardly give them a second thought. But seeing the blossom still attached to the plant is different.

This is where every banana begins.

More Than One Flower

The banana blossom may look like one enormous flower, but it is actually an inflorescence — a structure made up of many individual flowers.

The large purple-red parts are not petals. They are called bracts, and underneath them sit rows of much smaller flowers.

As the plant develops, the bracts lift one after another, exposing the flowers beneath.

The female flowers appear closer to the developing bunch of bananas. These are the flowers that produce the fruit. Farther down the stalk, toward the purple bud, are the male flowers.

When you see the blossom still hanging beneath a bunch of bananas, you can actually see different stages of the plant’s reproductive cycle on the same plant.

Hands and Fingers 🍌

Bananas also have some surprisingly human-sounding names.

The clusters of bananas growing together are traditionally called “hands,” while each individual banana is known as a “finger.”

Several fingers form a hand, and several hands together form the bunch.

Once you have seen bananas growing on the plant, the names suddenly make perfect sense.

It’s Not Actually a Tree

Despite its size and appearance, a banana plant is not a tree.

Bananas belong to the genus Musa and the family Musaceae. They are large herbaceous flowering plants — essentially enormous herbs.

What looks like a trunk is actually a pseudostem, formed by tightly overlapping leaf sheaths.

The flowering stalk grows up through the centre of this pseudostem before emerging from the top of the plant. As the flowers and fruit develop, the familiar bunch of bananas forms, with the purple blossom hanging below.

Some banana plants can grow several metres tall, which makes the fact that they are herbs rather than trees even more surprising.

Banana or Plantain?

In Costa Rica, you quickly become familiar with both banano and plátano.

They may look similar, but they are usually used very differently.

The sweet bananas most of us know as everyday fruit are generally dessert bananas. They are harvested green and become softer and sweeter as they ripen. Once ripe, they are commonly eaten raw.

Plantains and other cooking bananas tend to be starchier, particularly when green, and are usually cooked rather than eaten raw. Depending on their stage of ripeness, they can be savoury or surprisingly sweet.

Green plantains are used to make patacones: thick slices are fried, flattened and fried again until crisp around the edges.

Let them ripen, however, and the skin eventually turns yellow and then dark. The fruit becomes much sweeter and can be fried as plátano maduro.

But there is an important detail:

A plantain is not simply an unripe dessert banana.

How Long Does a Banana Take to Grow? 🌱🍌

Here’s something that might surprise you: most bananas we eat today aren’t grown from seeds at all.

Cultivated banana plants are usually propagated from new shoots growing from the underground rhizome, or through tissue culture. Under warm tropical conditions, it typically takes around 9 to 15 months from planting until the first bunch of bananas is ready to harvest.

And the banana plant has another fascinating trick: each pseudostem produces fruit only once. After the bananas are harvested, that stem dies back — while new shoots are already growing from below, continuing the cycle.

One plant, one bunch, and then the next generation takes over. 🌿

So Are Bananas and Plantains Different Species?

Not exactly — and this is where banana botany becomes particularly interesting.

Bananas belong to the genus Musa, and many cultivated bananas have their origins in two wild species: Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana.

Thousands of years of cultivation, selection and hybridisation have resulted in an enormous variety of edible bananas. The distinction between “banana” and “plantain” is therefore based largely on the characteristics of different cultivars and how we use them rather than on a simple division into two separate species.

Some were selected for sweet fruit that is pleasant to eat raw.

Others are firmer and starchier and are particularly well suited to cooking.

And many cultivated bananas fall somewhere in between.

That diversity is one reason bananas are far more interesting botanically than the supermarket fruit might suggest.

Scientific Classification

Genus: Musa
Family: Musaceae
Important ancestral species: Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana

Because we don’t know the exact cultivar of the banana plant we photographed at the National Museum of Costa Rica, we simply identify it as Musa spp. rather than guessing the exact species or cultivar.

Something We Usually Don’t See

Perhaps that is what made seeing this blossom in San José so interesting.

We usually encounter bananas at the very end of the story — separated into hands, transported, displayed in a supermarket or sitting in a fruit bowl.

On the plant, you see something completely different.

The enormous leaves. The developing fruit. The rows of flowers. The purple-red bracts. And the heavy blossom still hanging beneath it all.

A fruit that could hardly be more familiar suddenly becomes fascinating when you see where it actually comes from.

The next time you pick up a banana — or order a plate of patacones in Costa Rica — you might look at it a little differently. 🌿🍌

A Little Something for Your Kitchen 

And because bananas are just as wonderful in the kitchen as they are fascinating on the plant, we created a little something for you.

Our Banana Bread Recipe is available as a free printable download — designed to be used as a recipe and pretty enough to hang on your kitchen wall.

It’s super easy to make and takes only about 35 minutes to bake, depending on your oven.

Download Our Free Printable Banana Cake Recipe

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Protect Nature. Inspire Curiosity. Celebrate Biodiversity.

—

The Pura Vida Souqs Team

Next week on A Weekly Dose of Nature: The Sloth (Bradypus variegatus) 🦥🌿 — a quiet life high in Costa Rica’s treetops, where moving slowly is a surprisingly successful survival strategy.

In the meantime, meet one of Costa Rica’s three-toed sloths in our video on YouTube.