Banana grove

“ A banana tree is only a soft, spongy thing, like the stem of a huge lily. A blow of the machete would half sever the trunk, and the tree would bend, bringing the bunch of fruit within reach. The negroes would hack away the leaves, and remove the banana stalk carefully.
“When you cut down the tree, a lot of new ones grow up around it. Most people don’t know that. They tell about a new superintendent here that got all excited because the men were chopping down the grove. And we always kid new men by sending them for a ladder on their first boat day.” ”

“ Banana groves and orchards bending under the weight of the rich nutritious fruit, tall cocoanut-trees with half a ton of ripening nuts in every tuft top, ant-hills nearly as high as native houses, rippling cascades, small rivers winding through the green valleys, tall flamingoes presiding over tiny lakes, and flowers of every hue and shape, together with birds such as one gazes at with curiosity in northern museums, all crowded upon our vision on this trip inland. ”

“ He who would grow bananas for market must plant on the border of navigable waters giving access to some harbor or anchorage where ships may safely lie while receiving the fruit. For it is easily bruised, and wetting by salt water blackens the skins, thus injuring or preventing the sale. Plantations are usually on the banks of rivers or of estuaries, but some are beside railroads, to which the fruit is carried by carts thickly carpeted with banana leaves. A cruder way is to hang a few bunches over the back of a burro or of a mule, which plods along to the shipping place. ”

“ Rising in vast clumps, and spreading out sheaf-wise from the soil towards the sky, the curves of their beautiful jointed stems meet at such perfect angles above the way, and on either side of it, as to imitate almost exactly the elaborate Gothic arch-work of old abbey cloisters. Above the road, shadowing the slopes of lofty hills, forests beetle in dizzy precipices of verdure. They are green—burning, flashing green—covered with parasitic green creepers and vines; they show enormous forms, or rather dreams of form, fetichistic and startling. Banana leaves flicker and flutter along the way-side ”

“ As this process is repeated indefinitely it follows that unless these surplus stalks are cut out, a banana field would soon become a miniature jungle. Some growers follow the plan of allowing four shoots to grow in one hill, and their gradations are so arranged that while the oldest is bearing fruit the second is in blossom, the third is half-grown, and the fourth is just coming forth from the ground. In the majority of cases a new shoot will spring up from the old stalk if cut near the ground and there is plenty of rain. ”

“ The ubiquitous banana was [23] everywhere, growing wild in the forest, generally in the open glades of pandanus palms, whose scraggly trees twisted high in the misty air, with spikes of leaves like century plants at their branch tips. And every now and then, through the dim vistas of vine and creeper, they could note a dense thicket where a giant fig tree grew, surrounded by its own forest of aërial root shoots a hundred feet in diameter.
Down on the jungle floor scuttled millions of silent hermit crabs, or great orange-and-red land crabs popped down their holes. ”

“ It requires a deep soil, careful cultivation, plenty of rain, and shade for the young plants to reach their highest development. The best altitude is from 2,600 feet to 4,500 feet in this climate. On the lower elevations the plants must be shaded, and the banana is generally employed because it also produces a valuable crop and furnishes a revenue while the coffee trees are maturing. Corn may be planted among the trees if one is in a hurry to obtain returns from the land. ”

“ All around the garden the long, banner-like leaf of the banana is waving above great clusters of fruit. The air is heavy with odors of orangeblossoms, shining like waxen stars through glossy green leaves, by the side of glowing golden fruit. Immense pineapples are ripening within whorls of spear-like foliage, with a rich musky fragrance. The peasant huts, with conical thatched roofs reaching nearly to the ground, are half hidden in luxurious masses of unknown but beautiful bushes ”

“ Curious bales of sarsaparilla wrapped in white cowhide, great clusters of cocoanuts in their thick hulls, long tables with hundreds of specimens of dug plants and medicinal barks and roots, attracted curious crowds. The banana bulbs and stalks, 20 feet high, eleven months' growth, with the fruit which they had produced, gave the visitor an idea of what is possible by systematic culture, as a banana plantation with the proper care will produce fifty-two crops a year, which means a cutting every week. ”

“ The banana-tree renews itself annually, growing to a height of ten or twelve feet, and bearing heavy clusters of from sixty to a hundred individual fruits, green at first, but golden in hue when ripe. After bearing its fruit, the tree wilts and decays like a cornstalk, but in due time again springs up from the roots to bear another annual luxuriant crop. One clever writer tells us that the banana is "the devil's agent," because the abundant food supply which it affords, demanding so little of man in return, is a promoter of idleness. ”

“ Every little while along the way, jolly, muscular negro laborers swing up over the tail-board until by the time we have reached Golden Vale, said to be the oldest export banana farm in the world, there are enough of them to load the truck in a bare twenty minutes. It is scarcely necessary to say, I suppose, that bananas grow on a species of mammoth weed rather than a tree, that each produces a single bunch, that this grows “upside down” from our fruit-stand point of view, and that they must be cut before they are ripe. ”

“ In short, everywhere, except upon the perpendicular face of a late-moved boulder, vegetation thrives of every variety of greenness, form, and character.
About a day before we finally issued out of the forest region we were made still further aware what curious novelties in plants a natural conservatory can produce. Between Mtarega and Ulegga we were astonished at the huge girth of the wild banana plant, some of them being eighteen inches in diameter two feet above the ground. ”

“ A tree will bear three years after planting the seed, and on one branch will have ripe and green coffee and blossoms all at the same time. When ripe it is gathered and laid on the ground to dry, being stirred every morning to dry it equally. This whips the hull off, and it is taken to the village, where it sells for four cents a pound. Each hull holds two grains. One tree will live and bear, with little or no cultivation, for eighty years. Bananas are four years old before they bear. The finer banana is never seen in the States, as it will not bear shipping. ”

“ The banana has a value simply as an ornamental-leaf plant, quite apart from the consideration of its fruit, which one can buy, perhaps, better than one can raise, in this part of Florida; but it is glorious, when the thermometer is going up into the hundreds, to see the great, fresh, broad, cool leaves of the banana-tree leaping into life, and seeming to joy in existence. In groups of different sizes, they form most beautiful and effective shrubbery. The secret of gardening well here is to get things that love the sun. ”

“ The sand burns the feet of the little children, who leave their palm leaf balls and their pin-wheels of frangipani blossoms to wither in the sun, as they creep into the shade of the houses. The 17women who must go abroad carry great banana leaves as sun-shades or wind wet cloths about their heads. ”

“ He refers to the Paritium tiliaceum, a malvaceous plant, hardly noticed by Europeans, but very highly prized by the natives of the tropics, and cultivated everywhere in the East and West Indies; it supplies to the natives of these regions so far apart their ropes and cordage. It is always seedless in a cultivated state. It existed in America before the arrival of Columbus.
But Professor Kuntze pays especial attention to the banana, or plantain. The banana is seedless. It is found throughout tropical Asia and Africa. ”

“ As the suckers do not all rise simultaneously, the stages of growth of the young fruit-bearing trees vary, so that there is a constant supply all the year round. Moreover, it is customary to cut down, and hang up in the house, the stalk sustaining the fruit before it is ripe, so that each fruit can be eaten as it matures. The glossy leaves of the banana-plantain are exceedingly beautiful. They are used for polishing hardwood floors; they serve as a substitute for plates at the tiánguis and for wrapping-paper at the small native and Chinese grocersʼ shops. ”

“ So the planter of bananas has each year four and a half times as much palatable food from an acre as the farmer gets from his potatoes: and there is the [12] further difference that the one has bananas at no other cost than that of keeping down bush and grass and vine, that would quickly cover every spot to which the sunshine could penetrate, along the edges of the plantation. For bananas yield year after year without replanting. Each new stalk springs from the foot of its parent, grows to a height of fifteen to thirty-five feet, bears its burden of luscious fruit, and dies ”

“ The palmettos stood it, though their leaves have since curled a bit, showing that the cold penetrated their tough fiber.
The first frosts turned the upper leaves of the banana trees a light brown like that of elm leaves after they fall in the autumn. The two nights at seventeen killed the plants to the ground, and not even the thick coats that I saw hung over green bunches of bananas here and there sufficed to keep the fruit from freezing, any more than similar protection helped the flower beds any; the cold was too severe to be staved off in that way. ”

“ In the interior, of course, they dwell together in amity, because there is nothing for them to quarrel about.
The banana, planted with a careless hand, supplies the staff of life, besides thatch, fuel, and fibre for nets and lines: when they want cereals, maize, holcus, and panicum will grow almost spontaneously. The various palm-trees give building materials, oil, wine, and other requisites too numerous to mention. ”

“ As the cost of producing bananas after the first crop from a plantation is confined to cultivating and harvesting, which may be done for $10 per acre yearly, it is scarcely wonderful that Judge O’Hara, late U. S. Consul at Greytown, Nicaragua, a lawyer whose acute mind is trained to sifting evidence, reported to the Department of State at Washington regarding banana-growing on the Atlantic coast of that republic, that:
It seems reasonably certain that bananas on the Bluefields River pay better than many crops in the United States. ”

“ The stalk that bears the heavy bunch of fruit, occasionally weighing as much as eighty pounds, may be easily cut down by a single stroke of a scythe or a machete.
[Pg 96]
Under cultivation the fruit seldom produces perfect seeds, but if developed in a state of nature it is said that they will mature and that many varieties are produced.
The banana is frequently used in coffee plantations to make the necessary shade for the young coffee plants and at the same time it yields an income while the planter is waiting for the production of the coffee berry. ”

“ It is by this sterile stalk that we see the bunches hung in our shops; that is, in a position just the reverse of that in which they grow.
In the Eastern tropics, the number of varieties and species of bananas and banana-like plants is large; but in America those which are cultivated to any extent are very few. Indeed, of true bananas we need notice only two. The common yellow variety, which is almost exclusively that which our markets receive, is the only one raised in Jamaica, and the chief one everywhere. ”

“ A banana garden in full bearing is a very pretty sight, the thousands of plants, each with their one or more bunches of fruit, as, where there are several stems it is not at all uncommon to find two or more bunches of fruit in different states of development on the same plant, forming a mass of vegetation that must be seen to be appreciated. This is the case even with dwarf-growing kinds, but with strong-growing varieties, such as the Lady's Finger, the growth is so excessive that the wonder is, how the soil can support it. ”

“ Immediately under the equator is a wide area of heavy rainfall and dense forest. The rapidity and rankness of vegetable growth renders the region unsuited to agriculture. But the plentiful streams abound in fish and the forests in animals and fruits. The banana and plantain grow there in superabundance, and form the chief diet of the inhabitants. This may be called, for convenience, the banana zone. To the north and south of this zone are broad areas of less rainfall and forest, with a dry season suitable to agriculture. ”

“ In the year 1516, the banana was brought to the West Indian Islands by a monk, since which time it has rapidly spread over the tropics of America, and is found to the twenty-fifth degree north and south of the equator. It is equally indispensable and is appreciated by the immigrant and by the native as a beautifier of the landscape; affording shelter from the sun and rain, and giving bread to the children; for if every other crop should fail, the hungry native looks up to the banana tree, like a merchant to his well-filled storehouse. ”

“ When the last flame has flickered out and coals lie dead beneath their gray shroud, women paddle to that place with canoes laden with banana sprouts. With machetes they dig little pits amid charred stumps and trunks and branches, and in each hole they set a sprout. ”