A banana plant is blooming in an allotment garden in Drachten. As if it were in the tropics. “This is really special.”
Mila Balgobind was busy with the peppers, courgettes and beans in her Drachtster allotment garden on the Noorderend, when her eye suddenly fell on one of her banana plants.
She saw it clearly: her ‘pride’ was blossoming for the first time. When she came a little closer, she saw not only a flower bud, but also very small, green mini bananas. Not edible, because not even remotely grown, but still. “It makes me completely happy. I have never seen a fruit on my plant before. It’s normally way too cold here.”
Banana plants – which are also incorrectly called banana trees – feel most comfortable in tropical areas, with a temperature of 26 to 30 degrees. They like sun, damp weather and lots of liters of water.
Also a bad sign
“The plants remind me of home, of Suriname,” says Mila, who came to the Netherlands in 1978. “In Suriname you see them everywhere. To be honest, I would like to fill the entire garden with them. I think they are really beautiful. Also look at the beautiful green leaves. In our Hindustani culture we use them as a kind of food plates.”
Mila’s husband Harry also thinks it’s wonderful. “But in some ways I also think it is a bad sign,” he says. “Because a banana flower like that is proof that the earth is warming. I think a flowering banana plant would have been impossible in this place until about ten years ago.”
Peter van der Meer, lecturer in tropical forests and sustainable palm oil at Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences, has often seen flowering banana plants in the Netherlands. “But in a greenhouse. The fact that they bear fruit in the Dutch outdoors is really special. That seems quite unique to me. It could indeed have something to do with climate change.”
Breathable plastic
You have banana plants in different shapes and sizes. “I think that the specimen in Drachten is of a variety that normally occurs mainly in subtropical areas, where it is slightly less warm. It naturally adapts to the slightly colder winters.”
Admittedly, Mila Balgobind has helped her pride a bit. Last winter she wrapped the trunk in breathable plastic. “That seems to have an effect,” she says.
Banana plants, says lecturer Van der Meer, have a lifespan of 18 to 24 months. “The root branch remains alive and at a certain point it will sprout again. In the tropics, a bunch grows on each stem. When the trunk is cut down, a new one grows from the same root.”
Hope for new bananas
Smaller plants have emerged next to Mila Balgobind’s plant, but they all have the same root as their ‘source’. There is no felling in the Drachtster allotment garden. Nor did I eat. The tiny bananas will certainly not survive with autumn and winter just around the corner.
“But next year we hope that there will be new bananas and maybe they will be a little bigger than this one.”