香牙蕉

Wild plants are diploid (2 n = 22) and bear fruits containing numerous seeds making them inedible. Cultivated plants are triploid (2 n = 33) and bear seedless, edible fruits; such plants have been called M. acuminata ‘Dwarf Cavendish’ ( M. cavendishii Lambert ex Paxton; M. chinensis Sweet; M. nana Loureiro).

Pseudostems heavily blotched with brown or black. Petioles: margins of adaxial groove erect, winged proximally. Inflorescences: pedicels short; bracts of staminate flowers lanceolate or narrowly ovate, apex acute, abaxial surface yellow, red, or dull purple, adaxial surface yellow proximally, often yellow or dull purple distally. Staminate flowers white or cream. Pistillate flowers: stigmas deep yellow or orange; each locule with 2 regular rows of ovules.

Pseudostems green with black blotches, ca. 4.8 m. Leaf sheath and petiole pruinose; petiole ca. 80 cm, margin erect or spreading and basally with scarious wings; leaf blade adaxially green and pruinose, abaxially yellow-green and pruinose or not, oblong, 1.9--2.3 m × 50--70 cm, base cordate, asymmetric, midvein adaxially green, abaxially white-yellow. Inflorescence subhorizontal or vertically reflexed; peduncle usually downy or hairy. Bracts bright red to dark violet, sometimes yellow at extreme apex, ovate, apex usually acute. Male flowers ca. 20 per bract, in 2 rows. Compound tepal white or cream, lemon yellow at apex, 3.5--4 cm, apex of outer lobes with a hooklike, hairy appendage; free tepal not more than 1/2 as long as compound tepal, apex emarginate, shortly apiculate. Infructescence ca. 1.2 m; peduncle to 70 × ca. 4 cm, white setose. Berries incurved, green to yellow-green, 5-angled when young, cylindric at maturity, ca. 9 cm, white setose, base curved and attenuate into a stalk, apex contracted into a rostrum 6--10 mm. Seeds numerous in wild plants but absent in cultivated clones, brown, depressed, 5--6 mm in diam., irregularly angled. 2 n = 22, 33.

introduced; Fla.; Mexico, West Indies, Central America; and South America; native, s Asia; Africa; Pacific Islands (, Oceania).; native, s Asia.

Native in W Guangxi and Yunnan; cultivated in Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Taiwan, and Yunnan [India, Indonesia (Java), Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam].

Flowering all year.

Abandoned gardens and disturbed sites; 0--10m.

Shaded and moist ravines, marshlands, semimarshlands, slopes, also cultivated; near sea level to 1200 m.

Musa cavendishii Lambert