An Extraordinary Inflorescence - Just for Beauty
Life in Nninzi village would only be life at all with the plant known as highland bananas. Everywhere one looks, banana groves flourish. Bananas are tall, unbranched herbs! They do not have a stem, as the apparent stem consists of overlapping leaf bases with a central fragile core or stalk. Some have short stalks up to five feet. The most significant number have medium-height stalks of ten feet. Then there are the giants with stalks reaching up to fifteen feet. In Nninzi, we use every part of the banana plant directly, except maybe the roots. But I suspect there is someone who knows some medicinal value of banana roots. However, we want to look at the most beautiful part of a growing banana plant - the inflorescence - the final part of the core or stalk. The dictionary gives three related definitions: the part of a plant that consists of the flower-bearing stalks, the arrangement of the flowers on the stalk, and the process of flowering blossoming. When an inflorescence emer...