A rare buyer of exotic and outlandish fruits thinks about where they came from, how and on what they grow, how they are harvested. Even less often, the question arises as to which way (air? Sea? Land?) They covered before getting into the hands of the buyer. Thus, the overwhelming majority of overseas fruit lovers are sure that they know where and how bananas grow - in Africa on palm trees. And … they will be wrong.
Homeland of bananas
Indeed, many believe that the birthplace of bananas is Africa. This is not true. In fact, bananas came to the African continent from Southeast Asia, mainly from the tropical and subtropical regions of India and China. In these countries, bananas have long been revered as sacred fruits that restore strength and nourish the mind. The roofs of some ancient Indian pagodas that have survived from that time are shaped like a banana, which is how much this fruit was respected here.
Further, the banana culture from India and China spread to Asia Minor. And from there it was already transported to Africa by Arab merchants, for whom the waters of the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages represented the same "inland sea" as the Mediterranean Sea was for the ancient Greeks and Romans. The same merchants brought bananas to Palestine and Arabia.
It should be said that by the time the Portuguese navigators appeared on the west coast of Africa (this was at the beginning of the 15th century), bananas had already "bypassed" the entire continent from west to east. The Portuguese tried them for the first time in Guinea. The outlandish fruits were to their taste. They made the first importation of bananas from Africa to the Canary Islands, and then began to plant them in their colonies in Central and South America.
This is how interesting it turned out: the countries of Central and South America received the latest banana plantations in the world, and they were the most successful in cultivating and selling them. Panama, Colombia, Ecuador supply bananas to all of Europe today. As for Russia: if before the population ate exclusively Cuban bananas, now, along with the Europeans, they mainly buy fruits from Ecuador.
How bananas grow
Bananas grow on a palm tree. So everyone answers. Well, almost everything. In fact, according to encyclopedic data, the banana is "a genus of perennial herbaceous plants." Or: "a genus of tree-like tall plants from the banana family with huge leaves and large zygomorphic flowers collected by an ear." That's it - bananas grow on the grass.
Yes, a resident of central Russia, accustomed to picking strawberries or, say, blueberries in the grass, bending over three deaths, can hardly imagine a bunch of bananas weighing half a centner growing on a herbaceous plant with a height of 5 to 9 meters. True, this is in nature, where the height can generally reach 12 or more meters, while bananas, bred by selectors and cultivated today, do not exceed one or two meters. But it will also impress …
In addition, the diameter of one such "blade of grass" is 10, or even more, centimeters. On its top flaunts a spreading panicle of oblong leaves (they are taken by Europeans for palm branches). A kind of trunk about one and a half meters in length hangs from a deciduous rosette. This is the inflorescence on which an ovary of 250-300 tiny bananas is formed. What the European resembles a trunk, it is more correct to call a bunch, and what lies on the market and store counters, in fact, are not bunches, but clusters of five to eight fused fruits. A true banana bunch is a set of brushes that fit very closely together.
