They are the perfect tropical plant for cool climes
It’s a question I always dread: what’s your favourite plant? With an estimated 400,000 species to pick from, talk about a tough choice. But if I absolutely had to grow just one group of garden plants, it would be the hardy banana.
Despite finding their centre of diversity in the lowland tropics of south-east Asia, there are several banana species from the northerly (and especially high-altitude) edges of their range that experience significant levels of frost, and a climate on a par with that of many areas of Britain. The classic example of this is the Japanese hardy banana, Musa basjoo, which actually hails from Sichuan in China and has been recorded as being “root hardy” to as low as -20C if kept dry. So even when the above-ground section of the plant is turned to mush by freezing temperatures below -5C, it is capable of regenerating from energy stores in underground corms the following spring.
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