• Common Name: Plantain, Banana

  Musa is a relatively small genus of about 50 species that has as its main claim to fame the Banana, perhaps the archetypal tropical fruit. Bananas are grown over a huge area of the tropics, almost 10 million hectares, with an annual production of around 88 million metric tons. The vast majority of producers are small-scale farmers growing bananas either as a staple crop for home consumption or for local markets.

  Despite the importance of bananas as a source of human food and trade, the genus Musa is not at all well understood. They are very difficult plants to study and little is known about the wild species. Partly because of this and partly because Musa nomenclature can be very confusing there is a lot of misinformation about Musa species in gardening books and plant catalogues.

Musa species. The natural, wild species of Musa are given Latin plant names and, at the moment, are sorted into six sections:

Australimusa
Callimusa
Ingentimusa
Rhodochlamys
Musa 1
Musa 2

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