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Musa balbisiana
Also called Plantain, Sweet Wild Banana
Musa balbisiana is a wild banana species from South and Southeast Asia, one of the ancestors of cultivated bananas. It grows as a large, upright clump of leaves and is grown mainly as an ornamental or for its wild fruit and leaves.
Musa balbisiana, also known simply as plantain, is a wild-type species of banana. It is one of the ancestors of modern cultivated bananas, along with Musa acuminata.
It is native to eastern South Asia, the eastern regions of the Indian subcontinent, northern Southeast Asia, and southern China. Introduced populations exist in the wild, far outside its native range.
It is assumed that wild bananas were cooked and eaten, as farmers would not have developed the cultivated banana otherwise. Seeded Musa balbisiana fruit are called pisang batu (rock banana) in Indonesia and Malaysia, butuhan ('with seeds') in the Philippines, and kluai tani (กล้วยตานี) in Thailand, where its leaves are used for packaging and crafts. Natural parthenocarpic clones occur through polyploidy and produce edible bananas, examples of which are wild saba bananas.. In Indonesia, these bananas can be made into rujak.
Edible banana · Musa ×alinsanaya · Bulada Banana · Japanese Banana · Pisang Tajak · Scarlet Banana · Giant Highland Banana · Flowering Banana · Laterite Banana · Javanese Wild Banana · Abacá · Fe'i banana
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Musa balbisiana by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
