Tropical Zone Gardening: Musa ingens, 1 by tropicbreeze

tropicbreeze wrote:
I found the old fruit stalk which was small by comparison to the plant, but much the same size as the cultivated bananas. The fruit was all gone. Further along the track I saw another lower in the valley which was fruiting. The bunch wasn't very big but the male part of the inflorescence had strangely rounded bracts, unlike the pointier ones I'd seen on other bananas.

As with the pandanuses, I felt like a Lilliputian in Gulliver's land.

These were on the slopes of Mount Bellamy, in Oro Province, lower down than where I saw most of the pandanus. Possibly it's very widely spread throughout mountainous regions of PNG, and perhaps Irian Jaya (West Papua). But I understand it won't grow in tropical lowland areas, has a very limited tolerance range of temperatures, neither too high nor too low.

You can see the rounded flower bracts in the photo, even though it's a bit of a poor shot, being against a bright sky.