propagation tales: the strange story of the cavendish banana.

Vegetative propagation. Along with sowing seeds, one of the cornerstones of gardening. When you propagate a plant in this way, you take a cutting or part of the parent plant and grow it on. These plants are genetically identical to their parents, rather than a plant grown from seed, which combines the genes of both it's parents into it's own genetic code.

Remember a few years ago, when a fungus started attacking the worlds banana plantations and we envisioned a future without bananas as we know them? (more info here ...)

This turn of events takes us on a strange journey back in time, back to the year 1834, to an unexpected place, the greenhouse at Chatsworth House.... Derbyshire.

     a modern banana plantation.

Derbyshire is not normally a place you'd associate with banana farming, yet one hundred and eighty years ago it was the place that spread the Cavendish banana, familiar from supermarkets all over the western world, to the far corners of the tropics. This mass monoculture (when a crop of just one kind is grown in huge swathes) is what has caused this impending banana crisis of doom.

Imagine, if you will, a world where to get a banana, a huge sea voyage, lasting months if not years, had to be undertaken. In Britain, bananas were a delicacy so scarce, so difficult to get hold of, only a handful of people had ever tried one.

At the same time, the stately homes of Britain strived to outdo each other with fabulous gardens, flourishing kitchen gardens and elaborate greehouses, growing tropical oddities and luscious fruits of all kinds. Employing teams of gardeners, they filled their greenhouses with exotic plants, hunted from all corners of the empire and beyond. And the head gardener at Chatsworth, Joseph Paxton, had managed to get hold of a banana plant, smuggled back from China. He dutifully propagated it and in 1839 sent a case of baby plants to Samoa with a missionary, John Williams.
The great glasshouse at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, sadly since destroyed.

The poor little banana plants sat in their heavily shuttered wooden wardian case, withstanding lashings of salt spray (very poisonous to most plants) and starved of light, in fact only one of the plants survived the journey.

the last known original wardian case from the 1830s 

 It was planted when John Williams arrived, and did significantly better than him, as he was killed and eaten by the locals. This banana plant thrived and was the grandaddy of the bananas plants that flourish across the south pacific today.
 Cuttings from the Derbyshire plant ended up getting sent across the world, and today every standard supermarket banana is genetically identical to that original plant. That is why disease is such a problem for the Cavendish banana plantations; no genetic variation means no variation in disease resistance so one fungus can take hold and wipe out the whole lot.

Could it be curtains for the banana as we know it? The one that was included in the last meal of the King of Rock n Roll, Elvis Presley?

Who knows, but luckily there's a host of non-cavendish varieties that we could be growing, so bananas will be on the menu for a while yet.