Tropical fruit in flower – Pineapple and Banana

Musa Dwarf Cavendish group – inflorescence with young fruit and flowers.

Slightly over one year from planting out our Dwarf Cavendish banana is now in full bloom and the female flowers are already beginning to develop their distinct bunches of fruit.  You can see the plant as it looked in September 2012 in a blog by Sam Hickling.  For detail on the banana family including floral morphology and leaf anatomy Pei Liew’s blog on Musaceae offers well illustrated detail.  This is the first time in several years we have flowered this clone of the edible banana.

Pineapple inflorescence Top View

As well as this we also have our first pineapple (Ananas comosus) in flower in several years.  This plant, gown from the top of a supermarket pineapple, was donated by Justin Groves last summer.  It is a lot bigger than the plants we grew from tops last February.  Currently the inflorescence is about the size of a tennis ball.  The flowers are a typical bromeliad purple seen in Tillandsia, Neoregelia and a range of other genera.  The whole plant is about 60cm in diameter.  While this is fun to grow, and you can root pineapple tops very easily from ripe fruit, the plants have very spiny leaf edges so it’s not a friendly plant to have indoors.