With warmer temperatures in the UK, a new twist is happening in gardening at home because of banana plants that produce fruits in areas where such occurrence used to be thought of as impossible. The trend, according to gardening experts, is a result of the success of plants that thrive on warm climates and the difficulty of cultivating traditional British crops.According to a report by BBC, one of the most extraordinary cases can be found in Rayleigh, Essex, where Peter and Emma Stav, lovers of tropical plants, have finally harvested bananas from 200 plants that they have been growing for 15 years.“I’m just absolutely amazed that it’s happened,” said Peter Stav, a 38-year-old school teacher, describing the unexpected success.
The couple grows a tough banana called Musa Basjoo, which is capable of surviving even in the cold British winters. Yet, although the plant itself has an ability to withstand the cold, the flowers freeze even before the fruits have developed due to cold weather conditions. Therefore, to increase the chances, the Stavs constructed walls around the plants.Peter Stav himself attributed the success to the recent warm weather. “Over the past couple of winters I haven’t wrapped them up because they’re nearly 3m tall, so it’s very difficult to wrap them. This year due to the heatwave, the plant has actually fruited,” he said.This trend is not restricted to Essex; Stephen Hind, an old man who hails from Suffolk, is equally amazed that his banana tree has started giving fruits after 76 years. Initially, he bought it just because he found it beautiful in a tropical sense, but now he is sure that the extremely hot weather recently prevailing is responsible for this development.Guy Barter, the chief horticulturist at the Royal Horticultural Society, feels that the changing climate is already affecting gardening activities. “The climate is warming up and bananas have not flowered in 20 years’ time in the past. It will be a red-letter day if the banana flowers,” said Guy Barter. Barter explained that the Mediterranean fruits like olives, figs and apricots were flourishing in parts of Britain owing to changes in climate patterns, whereas the more conventional British fruits like gooseberries and rhubarb were diminishing in some parts because of climatic change.James Wong, a TV presenter and botanist, supported Barter’s claims by mentioning how the cultivation of bananas became much easier thanks to warming weather conditions. “They are incredibly fast-growing if they have that heat,” he explained, and added that people living in cold regions of the country could wrap the stems in order to make sure that they would not suffer from frost.Although Wong made a joke about Musa Basjoo bananas are “basically like having a mouth full of ball bearings with half a teaspoon of banana on them,” he still claimed that bananas had always been fascinating for gardeners. What once was just a hobby of a few might now become common thanks to the changing climate in Britain. Another example of how changing weather patterns are altering our lives is the current surge in banana flowering, which is further proof that tropical plants are starting to grow not only alongside but also in place of more conventional British plants.
