58 
MUSA SAPIENTUM. 
the planters, who plant them in low rich ground, hy the sides of gullies {water 
courses^) where they produce fruit most part of the year. Since the period of its 
introduction, it has been cultivated with various success in the hothouses of this 
country. By some it is admired for the extreme magnificence and superiority of 
its leaves, and certainly, as a plant, calculated to impart ease and give an air of 
oriental grandeur to an arrangement of exotics, this stands without a rival, except 
we allow an exception among its congeners the palms. Others, no less admirers 
of its portly and stately habit, have been somewhat more deeply interested in its 
cultivation, from a desire to witness its enormous and nutritive produce, which so 
largely administers to the w^ants of so many of our fellow creatures in the parching 
regions of the tropics ; neither have the commendable exertions of those been alto- 
gether frustrated: but, on the contrary, it has been brought to produce its fruit, although 
somewhat inferior. One instance is given in Vol. IV. of the Horticultural Transac- 
tions, 183. In 1811, a plant of the Banana was planted in the pit of a stove. 
" It was then about six feet high, with a single stem, in each succeeding year it 
has produced a bunch of fruit, and, in 1819, two bunches; the first ripe in May, 
the other in August, having about four dozen of fruit on each stem. The plant is 
Fig. 3. 
now sixteen feet high, and measures three feet round at the bottom." The botanical 
descriptions may be briefly noticed as follows : Stem perennial, of a pale purple 
colour, occasionally interrupted with a cluster of dark spots ; full-grown, from 
twenty to twenty-five feet high. Leaves shaped like the M. paradisiaca, Csee 
fig. 3,) but more flaccid and of a faint purple colour, which gradually grows deeper 
I 
