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Seems like an opportunity to plug the latest video by my favorite YouTube long form documentary maker, OTR:
The History of the Banana
https://youtu.be/YVVD1cYelUE?is=ADLXFR_-mIMdDfom
Here gets into ancient innovations that allowed bananas to be grown outside of their native habitat in Papua New Guinea.
If you haven't seen his content, and you get sucked in, then settle in without distractions - this is the opposite end of spectrum of TikTok, etc. Also, don't watch his "History of Sugar" documentary if you are feeling depressed. Instead watch the "History of Curry".
If you like this long format style of video, you might enjoy Asianometry, "video essays on business, economics, and history." [0] Here is a video on the banana also, "The Wildly Infectious Banana Plague." [1]
My favorite is the history of chili pepper. It's something so fundamental to indian cuisine that I assumed chillies were native to India for a long time. His video shows the true history of how that spice travelled from the Americas to all over the globe
Didn't expect to see this on HN, but it's definitely one of my favorite YouTube channels. Most food history content online feels like straight up readings from Wikipedia, but OTR does actual research and interviews. The Golden Triangle episode where they interviewed the anti-CCP rebel veteran who was like 90 years old was pretty neat. Doesn't sound like it'd tie into food, but it does.
Sugarcane is also thought to be originally from New Guinea, although it spread widely in prehistory.
> He pointed out that Musa Basjoos are not really for eating.
> He said: "It's basically like having a mouth full of ball bearings with half a teaspoon of banana on them."
Maybe we can iterate on the texture some more here.
Here is a photo of the seeds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_a_wild-type_banana...
Is the flesh soft and sweet like a modern cultivated banana? I wonder how different it is to eat one of those compared to something like a tamarind, which is also mostly seeds, covered in a relatively small amount of edible delicious stuff.
Prior to human intervention, 'bananas' were small with tons of seeds.
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. Every banana that has ever existed has been a clone of that one plant. Every so often, a new mutation occurs that gives us a new variety, but they all trace back to that one plant. It is the most extreme type of monoculture and is constantly threatened by parasites like the Panama Disease, because if one plant is vulnerable, they all are.
The UK straddles the 55th parallel North. Due to the jet streams (and formerly, trade winds) carrying warm air from the Caribbean, it has often benefitted from a milder climate than other regions at similar latitudes: Alaska, Siberia, the Baltic states.
But this is wild. I am only in my 40s but I've seen the climate change significantly and it having a major impact on flora and fauna.
When I was a kid, English wine was a joke and now it's winning prizes because we have the same climate French vineyards did when I was a child. The idea of growing olives in the UK was laughable, but now in the South East of England it's starting to look commercially viable. Only 10 years ago I remember days with highs over 30C being rare, but we just had two weeks of them, accompanied by tropical nights (not dropping below 20C), for the first time I remember.
And now... bananas. Which is, pun intended, utterly bananas.
It feels too late to stop the worst of the damage, but the idea of this accelerating and getting worse is just astonishing to me, that within my lifetime I'd witness such a huge swing in climatology.
People/companies are already testing avocado, banana, and coffee plantations in Italy at scale. Climate change really is insane.
Just wait till the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation halts, then you can grow icicles!
Last year ours bloomed, too. The problem is that it happens to late in the year and I can’t wrap that 5m high “tree” to protect from the cold. So the bananas were the size of your pinky. Next problem, once they bloom, they die. So yes, climate change is real. For comparison, we are located in south Germany near Stuttgart and we also have a fig tree and an olive tree in our garden.
Are figs rare in central europe climates?
I live in Hungary and they seem to be relatively widespread, if not as much as in southern Europe.
I have a paw paw tree that has survived 7 years in northern Wisconsin. Unfortunately it is the only one out of five that I planted that has survived and so I'll never get fruit because they reproduce sexually and as far as I know the closest one is 4 hours south in Madison.
Pawpaws are actually hermaphroditic not dioecious. Your tree produces female flowers first and later in the year produces male flowers. This is to prevent self-pollination. However, you can save some male pollen until next year.
Alternatively, you could graft the branch of a pawpaw that flowers earlier to try and get the male and female flowers maturing at the same time. You might also be able to just buy some pollen. It's actually quite easy to collect. You can use a brush to sprinkle it on a female flower
Graft a steam with a different variety and then you will need a lot of flies, or a brush and some artistic strokes in May.
There are dating sites for dogs. You may create a dating site for trees.
That's a predicament. What are you gonna do? What's it doing 4h away from a booty call? That's a bit cruel.
You can order the trees online.
In South America there's a very aggressive spider that lives on the bananas (genus Phoneutria). Spiders usually shy away from humans but these attack and have a very nasty venom. I wonder if the heat will take nasty critters to Europe.
We grow bananas at our farm in India and we have never seen this spider ever.
Phoneutria are interesting animals. Needed to evolve defenses against the gluttony of monkeys. It must be a tasty spider.
It happens that we are monkeys also, so the venom is carefully designed against us.
There is a registered case of a Phoneutria bite in UK at least, and the chef was sent directly to an hospital. To be fair, they dislike the cold so the spider had its reasons to be upset when he opened the fridge to grab a banana.
The spider is easily identified because it has four identical small frontal eyes arranged as a perfect square. Is big, bold and it warns before to attack [1] (most tarantulas are shy). And it jumps, of course. Can hide, once in a blue moon, in exported South American banana bunches (European breed bananas are spider free).
[1] If it raise the legs showing the yellow and black rings beneath is a clear warning saying "get lost right now, of I will land on your face"
Reminds me of Cecropia trees which are adapted to use some ant species as self defense. The trees live 20-30 years (the same length as an ant queen) and exudes a protein rich substance to feed the ants called Müllerian bodies. The ants in return aggressively protect the tree.
I grow a plantain orchard in South America and while i need to take double care of such spiders, they are not aggressive at all. I find them super cute and let visit my home as well. :)
With these heatwaves, many cities in France, Italy and England are at times *hotter* than cities in the tropical SEA! No wonder the bananas are starting to fruit.
> He added that growing banana plants in the UK is not new for a "geek in the plant world", but perhaps still niche to the average person.
Also, do you think that it may have something to do with being cities with stone and steel that absorbs and radiates heat, and that cities are no longer as filled with trees due to urbanization and immigration filling them with people?
For context, London, Rome, and Paris have respectively gone from 2.6M, 175K, 1.05M populations to 14.5M, 4.3M, and 12.4M; so basically a 6–25x population size in ~125 years. You don’t think that may have something to do with it?
More context 10 million people produce about 1-1.5 gigawatts of continuous heat energy alone. That’s energy that would also be absorbed into stone structures of European cities even if to an unapparent degree, especially in the summers.
This reminds me of the stone carvings found in Scotland showing grape vines growing there.
In other words, it used to be MUCH warmer in the northern latitudes.
I have several banana plants in my garden in Southern England. Musa Sikkimensis and Musa Basjoo, 3+m tall at the moment.
Winters are too cold for them here. So either you heavily mulch them and they start from the roots every spring while the stems die in winter. Or you learn how to wrap the stems to protect them over winter.
It might be possible, or borderline to keep them unprotected within London but outside of there and inland temperatures can drop below -5C even in the South.
On the other hand, I think they have started growing tropical fruits like mangos and bananas in Sicily.
In a couple of years all the head in the sand types will be commenting that "we've always grown bananas in the UK".
Slightly off-topic:
When I used to eat banana-flavored things (milkshakes, chocolate bars, etc), I always thought that the flavor was artifically inflated and tasted nothing like an actual banana...
...until I went to Fiji. Externally, the appearance of the banana would probably render it as waste in Western countries as it doesn't look nice and yellow - and looks close to what an overripe/rotten banana looks like, but gosh they tasted amazing!
It looks like Javanese call that banana as Gedhang Kluthuk (Stone Banana, direct translation).
The owner can use it to make a super delicious Rujak Cingur.
There were hippo bones found under Trafalgar Square, and once-upon-a-time (10kya) elephants, lions, and rhinos were once endedmic to Britain
The UK does seem more like a banana republic each year.
... Botanist James Wong has appeared on the BBC's A Countryside Summer
Wong, 45, has presented for BBC series' Grow Your Own Drugs and Secrets of Your Food.
Curious what is the latest on genetic improvement of banana against Panama disease ?
Lovely
Um. I wonder if there are any export opportunities for British Bananas ?
> ...while we say goodbye to some old favourites.
An incredibly dystopian way to minimise human-caused climate change and potential extinction for yet more species.
Potential? The Holocene Extinction is already the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history, and that's pre-climate-change.
I saw a banana tree with green bananas in Fribourg Switzerland in September 2025. According to Gemini this city is much colder than Essex, and yet.
> According to Gemini
According to Gemini, lots of untrue things are true.
More useful to look at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/World_Ha... and see if that makes more sense, although seemingly it's changing a bit and that graphic is quite old by now (2012). A plant's survival depends on more than just its hardiness and what zone it's in of course, but it's a useful starting point.
> According to Gemini this city is much colder than Essex, and yet
And according to science Fribourg offers more growing degree days
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/45015~56049/Comparison-of...
> "Could bananas be common in British gardens soon?"
Unlikely
> I saw a banana tree with green bananas in Switzerland
1) I believe you. This is not rare. Culturing a banana tree is super easy.
You can easily find one ornamental dwarf banana for your office in Zurich, put it outside in summer and enjoy the sight of the little green bananas. You just need lots of water, a decent sized pot (bananas can produce fruit in pots), some manure and a summer hot. All of this can be found in Switzerland.
Just don't expect fruit.
2) Growing bananas to their harvest time is the impossible part.
Flowers need to mature all winter long, and if they touch just a little chill, commercial banana fruits will stop growing, the stems will wither and collapse to the ground. They need more than 12 months of non-stop warm temperatures to became yellow and tasty. Your banana tree should be treated as an annual herb or kept indoors for many months each year.
But, there are more in this history.
There are around 50 species of banana trees. And lots of hybrids. There are yellow bananas, green bananas, lipstick pink bananas and steel blue bananas.
Some species evolved in mountains of tropical areas. Basically a temperate climate. The trunks that support the fruits can stand much more cold without dying. The problem is that they have small short bluish green bananas that don't worth the effort.
So far, those species are collector oddities or kept for hybridization purposes; but everybody in the field would salivate about breeding a seedless banana of decent quality that stands cold. This creatures are very productive.