Banana trees are made up of giant leaves, not a trunk. So they’re more like a giant onion instead of a tree.
I just don’t respect botanical definitions any more. Who cares what they think berries, fruits, grain and nuts should be? They can’t even define a tree! If anyone gets to define these terms for every English speaker, it sure isn’t going to be them.
Culinary definitions all the way! Unfortunately, they have no satisfying category for rhubarb either.
Blueberry just chilling there in the corner the whole time, secure in their berry-ness
they wouldnt accept it quite so easily. their pride would make them devolve into berry cultists, never accepting the truth.
And there are also small cute pink self-peeling bananas (Musa velutina)
They are fast-growing plants, with a growth rate of up to 1.6 metres (5.2 ft) per day.[5]
holy shit
Fun fact: banana tree trunks grow horizontally underground. The above ground part is a leaf bunch that produces exactly one bunch in their lifetime. Which is why farmers cut it down after harvesting, to stimulate the tree to produce new shoots and more nanners.
I feel like they’d feel pretty warm to the touch if they are growing that fast.
I feel like bananas would be cold as hell if they were growing that fast.
So I’ve searched and searched and my wife and I watched a lot of YouTube timelapses and we couldn’t find one that grew that fast. Not saying it isn’t the max, but it’s probably very abnormal
Anecdotal, but I’ve seen banana plants push out leaves vertically nearly that fast at their peak growth. Each leaf can be close to 6ft long, maybe longer. They shoot straight up out of the top of the plant when they come out, so they do temporarily add that much height.
When the leave gets completely pushed out, it unfolds and leans to the side and in the end only adds a foot or less to the full height.
Not sure if that counts, but they are fun plants to have. I’m in Midwest America… so you don’t have to be in a tropical area to grow them, but we do have to cut it down every year and cover it in mulch and leaves to protect it.
Our biggest gets to 16-18ft tall every year. One of it’s children we’ve given away is a bit bigger.
wikipedia cites this book for reference
No such thing as a tree really (genetically speaking), trees are just a bunch of plants that converged on a similar niche but they don’t all share a common ancestor (some trees are more closely related to brocoli than other trees), lots of different things evolved into what we now call trees seperately from eachother so a bannana tree is as much a tree as any other tree.
That doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as trees though. It means a tree is a growth form, a life strategy, just like a succulent, a geofyte or an epifyte. It’s a group of plants that have a lot in common despite not being related, and they are well defined. And one of the important defining characteristics of a tree is true wood production, which is missing in bananas. The life form of a banana is much more similar to ginger than to any tree.
The same goes for everything that lives then. There is no such thing as a mammal, they are just a form of prototheria! A lot of them just evolved into what we consider marsupials or eutheria. But a koala is just as much a mammal as a lemur!
Now this is a much smaller branch ofc, but you could slap it onto anything more vague. Reptiles, fish, crabs… and worse… fungi. Not to mention the archea.
