Tropical Zone Gardening: Musa ingens, 1 by tropicbreeze

tropicbreeze wrote:
While trekking in PNG I took lots of photos - people, scenes, plants and also textures. It was the interest in textures that focused my attention on a "fallen log". In the low light under the jungle canopy it looked strange, and interesting. Then it suddenly dawned on me, I was looking at the texture of old banana trunk. Except that this one was gi-normous, to put it mildly. The crown was already broken up, rotted away. But the deteriorating trunk was so huge you couldn't put your arms around it, and it was really long.

I said to one of the locals "It's a giant banana!" He just responded that it was "A bush banana". We'd seen plenty of the smaller ones, especially in abandoned village gardens. I looked around and then saw some amongst the tall rainforest trees up the slope. Their trunks were the size of other large trees, and were of the same height. Just towering up into the canopy.

In the photo the closer tree (middle) is clear but a bit further back to the right is a larger trunk. It was hard to get a good picture in the fairly dense jungle of something so large.