Description:

An exotic, tropical splash to gardens, producing interesting orange-yellow flowers with pink bracts; fruits are more for show than for eating; best suited to warm temperate climates and can take light freezes; a nice landscape accent or container plant

Ornamental Features

Flowering Banana is a wonderfully ornamental plant with characteristically tropical foliage and uniquely interesting flowers. Its attractive enormous textured oval leaves remain bluish-green in color throughout the year. This plant features showy gold flowers with orange overtones and rose bracts rising above the foliage from mid spring to mid summer. The dark green fruits with chartreuse overtones and which fade to yellow over time are held in clusters from early fall to early winter.

Landscape Attributes

Flowering Banana is an herbaceous evergreen perennial with an upright spreading habit of growth. Its relatively coarse texture can be used to stand it apart from other garden plants with finer foliage.

This plant will require occasional maintenance and upkeep, and should never be pruned except to remove any dieback, as it tends not to take pruning well. It has no significant negative characteristics.

Flowering Banana is recommended for the following landscape applications;

• Accent
• Mass Planting
• Hedges/Screening
• General Garden Use
• Container Planting

Planting & Growing

Flowering Banana will grow to be about 10 feet tall at maturity, with a spread of 7 feet. It tends to be leggy, with a typical clearance of 3 feet from the ground, and should be underplanted with lower-growing perennials. It grows at a fast rate, and under ideal conditions can be expected to live for approximately 30 years. As an evegreen perennial, this plant will typically keep its form and foliage year-round.

Bananas are curious plants in a botanical sense. Strictly speaking they are perennials, with individual shoots rising up from underground rhizomes and maturing in one to two years, then ultimately dying after producing fruit, to be replaced by new shoots from the base. However, given their ultimate size and coarseness they almost behave as small trees in the landscape. This plant should only be grown in full sunlight. It does best in average to evenly moist conditions, but will not tolerate standing water. This plant should not require much in the way of fertilizing once established, although it may appreciate a shot of general-purpose fertilizer from time to time early in the growing season. It is not particular as to soil type or pH. It is somewhat tolerant of urban pollution. This species is not originally from North America.

Flowering Banana is a fine choice for the garden, but it is also a good selection for planting in outdoor pots and containers. Its large size and upright habit of growth lend it for use as a solitary accent, or in a composition surrounded by smaller plants around the base and those that spill over the edges. It is even sizeable enough that it can be grown alone in a suitable container. Note that when growing plants in outdoor containers and baskets, they may require more frequent waterings than they would in the yard or garden.