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Bananas – Part II - Borneo’s wild species Bananas
Published on: Saturday, November 01, 2014
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One of the showiest of these ornamentals is Musa beccari, or Beccari’s Banana, named after the Italian botanist and explorer, Odoardo Beccari. He has cropped up several times before in this column, for he wrote a wonderful book about his botanical explorations in Sarawak, entitled “Wanderings in the Great Forests of Borneo”, which was published in 1902, and his banana is only one of the many interesting species named after him.
Beccarii’s Banana is a small species, with beautiful, bright red, upright flower-heads. It is one of the few ornamental plants in Sabah that is actually native here.
One of the places it can seen at its best is in Danum Valley, where it grows wild along river banks and gullies but where it has also been planted extensively along the access roads and around the chalets at the Borneo Rainforest Lodge, blooming year round.
Not only is Beccari’s Banana beautiful, it is also a vital food resource for the wildlife, for it provides year-round nectar for sunbirds and spider-hunters, whose long, narrow curved bills are perfectly adapted to probing the long tubular flowers, pollinating them in the process.
The flowers produce nectar continuously, and the spider-hunters stake out all the flowering bananas in the area, visiting them on a regular circuit, a feeding strategy called ‘trap-lining’, so you can easily see them.
The Swamp Banana
Another very attractive species found wild in Borneo, also with upright flower heads, is the Swamp Banana, Musa campetris. ‘Campestris’ means ‘flat lowlands’, and the natural home of this plant is the lowland coastal swamps.
We used to see it frequently along the railway tracks from Kota Kinabalu to Beaufort, before the tracks stopped hugging the coast and turned inland along the rapids of the Padas Gorge on their way to Tenom, but with the clearing of the coastal swamps for development this species has become much rarer.
The Mountain Banana
Up in the mountains, yet another species, the Mountain Banana, Musa monticola, can be seen around the Kinabalu Park. This is a smaller plant, with a shorter, more horizontal inflorescence with large, persistent, rotting bracts, not one of the most attractive of species, but there are several in the Mountain Garden at the Kinabalu Park Headquarters that can be seen quite easily.
Other wild bananas are taller plants with inflorescences hanging down and are pollinated by bats as well as spider-hunters or sunbirds.
Borneo’s Banana
These include the rare Borneo Banana, Musa borneensis, with its fat yellow flower buds, but one of the commonest wild species is Musa acuminata, with its grey-purple flower-buds – one of the original wild species from which the domesticated bananas arose.
Food for wildlife
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The fruits of wild bananas are usually considered inedible to humans, they are so full of small black seeds, so hard that you could break your teeth on them, but they play a valuable role in providing food for wildlife - squirrels, civet-cats and porcupines eat the fruit - and the flower buds, especially of the cultivated forms of Musa acuminata, are widely appreciated by people and are often seen for sale in the Gaya Street market on Sundays.
Flowers as medicine
Musa acuminata also has its medicinal uses, mainly extracts of banana flowers, which are said to help heal wounds and prevent infections.
In the laboratory, flower extracts have been shown to inhibit the growth of bacteria such as E.coli, one of the main bacteria responsible for tummy infections and diarrhoea.
They have also been shown to reduce high sugar levels and increase haemoglobin levels in rats, which may be one reason why an Indian home remedy for excessive menstrual bleeding is to consume one cooked banana flower a day with yoghurt. Another reason is that it is said to increase progesterone levels, thereby reducing the bleeding.
Extracts of the juicy stems have been used to treat kidney stones and jaundice.
It’s not just the flowers that have medicinal uses. Rich in Vitamin B6, Vitamin C and potassium, the fruits help heal wounds as well as guard against heart attacks and strokes.
Leaves as plates!
The leaves are used widely as cooking utensils, plates, umbrellas, wrapping materials, and even for the soles of inexpensive shoes! Sticky banana sap is also used as an adhesive.
Even the minced-up skins of bananas can be used as a low-cost and effective way of rapidly removing lead and copper from polluted water sources.
Banana-leaf writing
Historically, banana leaves were also used in much the same way as palm leaves, to write on, but would not have lasted as long as palm leaves.
Wikipedia tells us that the development of the “rounded letters of many of the scripts of southern India, Burma, and of Java, is thought to be influenced by this. Sharp angles and tracing straight lines along the vein of the leaf with a sharp writing implement would risk splitting the leaf and ruining the surface, so rounded letters, or letters with straight lines in only the vertical or diagonal direction, were required for practical daily use. In such situations, the veins of the leaves function as the dividing lines of ruled paper, separating lines of text”.
Some authorities believe that it was so influential in the development of the mysterious, still undeciphered, ‘rongorongo’ script of Easter Island, that the fluting on the surface of elaborate wooden tablets was done in imitation of the banana leaf!
Religious role
In Hindu and Buddhist religion the banana plays an important role, mainly used during religious ceremonies. Entire plants are often placed the main door into a house, for marriage ceremonies, as the banana symbolises fertility and plenty.
In the Indonesian island of Bali, folded banana leaves are used as containers for flowers and other offerings made to the house deities.
Fibre
But perhaps one of the most important uses of the banana was as source of fibre and clothing – something that would have been valued almost as highly as food in early civilizations and it was another wild species, Musa textilis, or Abaca, that played a major part in this.
See more in Part III, next week.
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