Can banana trees walk?
Of course they can. I have walking onions too. The Egyptian, or walking onion produces bulbs on the end of the reproductive stem that bend over and take root the distance from the original bulb that is the length of the stem The banana tree produces one set of bananas and dies. The modern bananas are mostly sterile. Monocots have fibrous roots with no tap root. The huge pseudo stem of the banana palm would be in the way of new plants. The roots walk away from the mother plant and send up new shoots. These develop into new productive plants. This is the way they propagate asexually. This is the way the banana farmers replenish their plantations. Excellent question . It addle pated me for a bit.
Not exactly walking, but it moves around. Banana has an underground stem. What we see above ground is terms as psudostem, made up of layers of leave sheath. The true stem is compressed underground. The shoot buds developed on this true underground stem and will develop into suckers (the young plants), which later grow into matured banana plants. The suckers can grow in any direction around the mother plants. What exactly you see that is moving, is not the entire plant, but just an extension growth of the new suckers, which is keeping on moving forward. New suckers will keep on growing on older suckers and the process continue on and on. So if you revisit to the spot where you first planted the banana tree a few years later, you could have notice that the plants has move a few feet away from its original spot – not the same plant that you planted, but it’s actually the suckers. The original mother plant could have been chop down for harvest. Few factors could influence the direction of
Yes, well they do move but not exactly walking. This tree has no central root as such and it stands on a large number of roots that grow close to or above the ground. These roots tend to grow more on the side where there is light, and so if, for example, there seems to be more light to the west, more roots will grow on the west side and gradually the plant will move in that direction. The trees can move up to 15 centimeters a year. This is an example of positive phototropism, that is, the tendency of plants to grow or turn toward light. Bananas probably do something similar and I presume the direction is usually towards the equator.
