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Try watching a bit less Fox News and talk to real people sometimes. It helps.
Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
21–30 of 152 posts
Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prior to human intervention, 'bananas' were small with tons of seeds.
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. Every banana that has ever existed has been a clone of that one plant. Every so often, a new mutation occurs that gives us a new variety, but they all trace back to that one plant. It is the most extreme type of monoculture and is constantly th…
Naval oranges are all clones from a single mutant tree too
Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
#23I have several banana plants in my garden in Southern England. Musa Sikkimensis and Musa Basjoo, 3+m tall at the moment.
Winters are too cold for them here. So either you heavily mulch them and they start from the roots every spring while the stems die in winter. Or you learn how to wrap the stems to protect them over winter.
It might be possible, or borderline to keep them unprotected within London but outside of there and inland temperatures can drop below -5C even in the South.
On the other hand, I think they have started growing tropical fruits like mangos and bananas in Sicily.
Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
#24With these heatwaves, many cities in France, Italy and England are at times *hotter* than cities in the tropical SEA! No wonder the bananas are starting to fruit.
> He added that growing banana plants in the UK is not new for a "geek in the plant world", but perhaps still niche to the average person.
Also, do you think that it may have something to do with being cities with stone and steel that absorbs and radiates heat, and that cities are no longer as filled with trees due to urbanization and immigration filling them with people?
For context, London, Rome, and Paris have respectively gone from 2.6M, 175K, 1.05M populations to 14.5M, 4.3M, and 12.4M; so basically a 6–25x population size in ~125 years. You don’t think that may have something to do with it?
More context 10 million people produce about 1-1.5 gigawatts of continuous heat energy alone. That’s energy that would also be absorbed into stone structures of European cities even if to an unapparent degree, especially in the summers.
Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
#25I saw a banana tree with green bananas in Fribourg Switzerland in September 2025. According to Gemini this city is much colder than Essex, and yet.
> "Could bananas be common in British gardens soon?"
Unlikely
> I saw a banana tree with green bananas in Switzerland
1) I believe you. This is not rare. Culturing a banana tree is super easy.
You can easily find one ornamental dwarf banana for your office in Zurich, put it outside in summer and enjoy the sight of the little green bananas. You just need lots of water, a decent sized pot (bananas can produce fruit in pots), some manure and a summer hot. All of this can be found in Switzerland.
Just don't expect fruit.
2) Growing bananas to their harvest time is the impossible part.
Flowers need to mature all winter long, and if they touch just a little chill, commercial banana fruits will stop growing, the stems will wither and collapse to the ground. They need more than 12 months of non-stop warm temperatures to became yellow and tasty. Your banana tree should be treated as an annual herb or kept indoors for many months each year.
But, there are more in this history.
There are around 50 species of banana trees. And lots of hybrids. There are yellow bananas, green bananas, lipstick pink bananas and steel blue bananas.
Some species evolved in mountains of tropical areas. Basically a temperate climate. The trunks that support the fruits can stand much more cold without dying. The problem is that they have small short bluish green bananas that don't worth the effort.
So far, those species are collector oddities or kept for hybridization purposes; but everybody in the field would salivate about breeding a seedless banana of decent quality that stands cold. This creatures are very productive.
Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
#26Um. I wonder if there are any export opportunities for British Bananas ?
Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. Every banana that has ever existed has been a clone of that one plant. Every so often, a new mutation occurs that gives us a new variety, but they all trace back to that one plant. It is the most extreme type of monoculture and is constantly th…
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. I don't think so. There are a ton of varieties of banana that are grown from seed. Humans have cultivated them and selectively bred them from seed for thousands of years, just like every other plant. The seedless bananas that dominate western g…
Interestingly, apparently the Gros Michel banana (which you can still get, if you try hard enough) tastes much more like artificial banana flavor, because that was the dominant variety when the flavor was developed.
Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
#28With these heatwaves, many cities in France, Italy and England are at times *hotter* than cities in the tropical SEA! No wonder the bananas are starting to fruit.
> He added that growing banana plants in the UK is not new for a "geek in the plant world", but perhaps still niche to the average person. Also, do you think that it may have something to do with being cities with stone and steel that absorbs and radiates heat, and that cities are no longer as filled with trees due to urbanization and immigration filling them with people? For context, London, Rome, and Paris have res…
This is the first time I've seen someone blame immigration for climate change.
Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
#29Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
#30Um. I wonder if there are any export opportunities for British Bananas ?
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