Musa velutina

Every so often a plant does one strange, particular thing so well that the rest of the description turns into footnotes. Musa velutina is one of those. In late summer, from the top of a pseudostem no taller than a person, comes an upright spike of pink bracts and small tubular flowers, and behind the flowers a cluster of velvety pink bananas about three inches long. Then, when ripe, the fruits peel themselves. The skins split into curling strips and fold back on the stalk, exposing white flesh and a knot of hard black seeds, unprompted, in full view of whoever happens to be standing on the patio.

That habit, and the seeds, come from the wild side of the family. Grocery bananas are sterile triploid clones bred out of Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana across thousands of years of human selection, and what was selected for above all was the absence of seeds. Musa velutina was never put through that process. The species remains a wild diploid from the eastern Himalaya and Assam, still doing what a banana does in a forest clearing: wrapping a bright, soft, sweet package around a payload of seeds, then opening the package so that something will come and carry them away. What reads on a terrace as a party trick is a dispersal strategy far older than the fruit bowl.

The name arrived twice. Sulpiz Kurz described the plant in 1867 as Musa dasycarpa, on a diagnosis of admirable brevity: fruits hairy. Hermann Wendland and Oscar Drude published Musa velutina in Gartenflora in 1875, with a plate, and that is the name that stuck and was later formally conserved, leaving the older one in the synonymy as a piece of nomenclatural housekeeping. Velutina comes from the medieval Latin velutum, velvet, and the word is exactly right; the fruits carry a soft nap you can feel under a thumb. The genus name is less settled. Some trace Musa to Antonius Musa, physician to the emperor Augustus; others to the Arabic mawz, which simply means banana and is probably the honest answer.

Across monsoon Asia a banana leaf is a working object long before anyone calls the plant ornamental. In Assam and the eastern Himalayan foothills the broad blades go on the table as plates, wrap food set over steam, and serve as an umbrella at short notice. The fruit here is edible and honestly sweet, and one caution comes with that: the seeds are large, hard, and numerous enough that most people try a single banana out of curiosity and never bother with a second. Grow this one for the sight of the fruit rather than for the eating, and count the flowers, which draw bees and hummingbirds through late summer, as part of the return.

Site the plant where low light can come through the leaves rather than only onto them; late sun behind a banana turns the blades into stained glass and lifts the pink midrib from clear across a garden. Full sun and a rich, moist, well-drained soil give the fastest growth and the best flowering, but find some shelter from wind, because a banana leaf in a gale shreds along the veins into a ragged fringe and stays that way until the next leaf unrolls. Four to eight feet tall and three to five wide is the settled size, small enough for a courtyard, a poolside bed, or a large pot that comes under cover for the winter. Pair with cannas, hardy gingers, elephant ears, or anything that answers a paddle leaf with a different shape.

In Aiken the top growth goes down with the first hard freeze, which is normal and not a failure. The rhizome is the hardy part, root hardy to somewhere near zero degrees Fahrenheit, and gardeners as far north as zone 7b carry the plant through winter reliably in full sun under a deep mulch. Cut the frozen stems back, pile on a foot of shredded leaves or straw, and wait. New shoots push up out of the ground in late spring, and the plant flowers again the same year.