It's hard to grow 'bodacious' tropical bananas in your Kentucky garden

There seems to be something about gardeners, some fatal flaw or linked gene that predisposes all of us to insist on growing things we just shouldn’t try to grow.

If the wild type of a plant has white flowers, we want the pink flowered form. But if the wild form happens to have pink flowers, we wouldn’t be caught dead growing the common old pink stuff. We’d want the white one! And don’t even get me started on zone envy — that annual quest to grow plants that belong much deeper down in Dixie.

Think about it — if we all grew gardens full of Bermuda grass, poison ivy, tree of heaven and honeysuckle, how much more time would we have for collecting bottle caps, attending Star Trek conventions and napping on the couch?

Nobody ever accused us gardeners of being logical, folks!

And that brings us to today’s subject — the tropical banana.

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Most bananas and close relatives are native to a broad arc that includes parts of southern India, Southeast Asia, the warmer portions of Australia and southern Africa — decidedly not Kentucky. They tend to grow where warm temperatures and rainfall are consistent and dependable throughout the year. Yet, we insist on growing them in a climate where we annually experience frost and freeze, sleet and snow and generally undecided, finicky and ridiculously inconsistent and cold weather.

It takes a little more to grow a banana in Kentucky than in Indonesia!

Most banana species that we might recognize fall into the genus Musa. They form those gigantic, floppy leaves, large, fleshy trunks, and in the proper conditions, those recognizable fruits, whether the large yellow affairs we see in Kroger every week or any of the zillions of others that are much more common elsewhere on the globe. (Believe it or not, the banana fruit is actually a berry, produced from a single flower with multiple ovaries. And, technically speaking, raspberries and strawberries aren’t berries at all. They’re aggregate fruits!)

But when we grow bananas in our Kentucky gardens, it’s most often not for their berries but for the magically bold and luscious foliage. There is little else we can grow that can compete with bananas in the big, bold and bodacious texture category. There are green leaf forms, red leaf forms, tiny dwarf selections and even a few yellows. But overwintering them takes some planning.

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First off, the easiest way to overwinter a banana in Kentucky is to plant the one that can take our winters. Yes, there is actually one that can take all our winters can dish out and come back year after year. Musa basjoo is a southern China native that can form large clumps up to 15-feet tall or more. Of course these plants don’t survive aboveground through our winters. After a frost or two, we cut them back to the ground and top them off with a layer of mulch.

They re-emerge the following spring and usually increase in size by about 30 percent. The clump at Yew Dell Botanical Gardens has been in the ground for almost 15 years and throws off new shoots each year that we dig and share with friends (or sell at our spring plant sale). Unfortunately, there are no known red or yellow leafed forms of Musa basjoo out there — just the straight green. The fruit is inedible and small but is rarely formed except when we have unusually warm and long autumns. But we love it for its texture and cold hardiness.

All other tropical bananas need to be dug and kept free from freezing weather through the winter. But that doesn’t mean you have to turn your living room into a temporary conservatory. Here’s how we overwinter them at Yew Dell.

First, we let the banana plants get hit by a few initial frosts. The leaves will start to droop and brown but the stem will be just fine. Then we cut off all the leaves and dig out the trunk (pseudo-trunk, actually) and crown of the plant with as small a root ball as possible. We sit the plants in the shade and let them dry out a bit and then knock off much of the soil from the roots. The last step is to put them in a very large plastic pot and sit them in a garage where it gets cold but doesn’t freeze.

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We leave the plants in storage, roots partially exposed until late winter, when we move them into the greenhouse, properly pot them and start giving them a little water.  They push new growth and then we move them out to the garden after Kentucky Derby when fear of frost has passed. At home, if you hold off on potting them until the end of March, you’ll only have to endure them in the house for the month of April. And during good springs you could actually put them outside for your Kentucky Derby party!

Successfully overwintered bananas will tend to increase in size by 50 percent or more the second season and make that much more impact in the garden.

It may be a bit more involved in Kentucky, but the biggest banana tree in the neighborhood prize doesn’t go to just anybody. It takes that gene, you know, the one that makes you grow all the stuff you shouldn’t!

Yew Dell Botanical Gardens, 6220 Old Lagrange Road, yewdellgardens.org.