Musa velutina - Banana

This adorable little pink-flowered banana tree, known as Musa velutina, quickly forms a lush plant with large, highly ornamental leaves, imbued with a tropical sweetness. In just a few months, it produces beautiful upright inflorescences packed with pink bracts soon followed by pink and velvety, highly decorative bananas, even when grown indoors. Quite frost-sensitive, it thrives when cultivated in a large pot with fertile and moist soil.

The Musa velutina is a perennial herbaceous plant with a tuberous root native to India. Belonging to the musaceae family, it is another species of banana tree that stands out for its small size, as well as its highly decorative flowering and fruiting. This plant is semelparous, or annual, meaning it dies after the ripening of the fruits, and new trunks appear each year from buds carried by the rootstock. It develops a pseudo-trunk (stipe) that is green tinged with red, composed of the petioles of the leaves wrapped and tightly packed around each other, but never producing wood. The leaves unfold their laminas in a plume-like shape, quickly forming a beautiful tuft 1.70 m (5 ft 7 in) in height and 1 m (3 ft 4 in) in width.

The upright inflorescences gather yellow-orange flowers surrounded by old pink bracts, which soon turn into clusters of small, 7 cm (2.8 in) long bananas, velvety and of the same antique pink colour. They are edible, sweet, but contain numerous hard seeds that can damage teeth and make consumption rather unpleasant.
Its ornamental interest also lies in its opulent, shiny light green leaves, with a tropical charm. They measure between 60 and 80 cm (23.6 and 31.5 in) in length. In winter, when grown in open ground, its leaves disappear at the first frost, but the plant will sprout from the base the following spring. Its hardiness is mediocre (up to -5/-8°C (23/17.6 °F)) for well-established specimens. It is preferable to protect younger specimens from hard frosts, or to cultivate this banana tree in large pots.

Still little used in our European gardens, the pink banana tree can be used in flower beds, as a standalone plant, or placed in a large pot on the terrace or in the conservatory. In pots, it is necessary to monitor watering, fertilization, and protect the pot in winter. This remarkable plant, just like proteas, cannas, bamboos, giant miscanthus, or castor oil plants, will give a strongly exotic aspect to our gardens and terraces in temperate regions.

Just like perennial plants, banana trees go dormant during winter; their above-ground parts dry up and die. Plants shipped in winter are therefore cut back to the ground (leaves and stems) by our teams to allow for better growth in spring.