Ae ae bananas

TOG with one of his clumps of ae ae bananas

A few weeks ago, fellow blogger, TOG of Coral Gables, generously gave me a pup from one of his ae ae bananas. These huge, beautiful plants produce not only variegated leaves, but also fat, variegated fruit, which, TOG assures me, tastes wonderful, and can be treated as bananas or plantains, depending on their ripeness.

The ae ae comes from Hawaii and is difficult to grow anywhere on the mainland, although TOG has grown them successfully for 40 years. In fact, just after he gave me mine, folks from the Montgomery Botanical Center (closely related to Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens) were coming to get replacements for theirs that had died.

I was expecting a small pup, but I was given one that was about seven feet tall. TOG cut back the leaves to lessen the stress on the plant, and I planted it close to a coconut palm, where it seems to be quite happy. Fingers crossed it will survive and thrive!

My newly planted ae ae

Lychees

I love this fruit with its flavor of damask roses or rose water. Native to tropical China, I once read that a Chinese empress sent her servants 1,500 miles to bring her some. 

After picking, the hard skin turns from rosy red to brown and peels like an eggshell. The white, translucent flesh (technically, the aril) surrounds an inedible, dark brown to black seed.

I'm assured that some varieties are better than others, but I don't know which they are. And I don't know which one I have; it'll be some years before it's big enough to fruit.

The trees in the photos are in the neighborhood and the fruit in the last pic was given to us by a friend.

The divine scent of lemon blossom

A friend's lemon tree is in bloom and I could have spent my day sitting close to it.

Do you remember the calypso? "Lemon tree very pretty/ And the lemon flower is sweet/ But the fruit of the poor lemon/ Is impossible to eat."

For your list of things to do before you die: Walk, cycle or drive (with open windows) on a drowsy, sunny day through citrus groves when the trees are in bloom. You'll neither regret nor forget the experience.

Avocados

We've had two consecutive years of a bumper avocado crop. Unfortunately, they're not my favorite fruit, but these are a good variety and they'll spread like butter across a sandwich. I've been giving them away to anyone who wants some, but they're still way too many and the squirrels are having a fine old feast.

Last year, I gave some to Sparky. He wolfed them down and got diarrhea in the house, so he's not having any more. Some people I used to know moved, with their skinny black lab, to a house with several avocado trees. The next time I saw the dog, he was easily double the size. I think the owners finally resorted to putting a muzzle on him during avo season.

But why do trees make so much fruit when it only takes one successful germination to replace the parent? I found an answer in a 1990 movie called Mindwalk, starring Sam Waterston, John Heard and Liv Ullmann. It's kind of a forerunner to What the #*!$ Do We Know, with just as flimsy a "plot."

Waterston plays a failed presidential candidate who meets up with his poet pal, Heard, at Mont St Michel, off the Brittany coast. The film is all about the conversation they start with Ullmann's character, a Norwegian quantum physicist. It's she who puts forward the hypothesis that the tree -- my avocado -- is part of a much greater system and as such, the abundance of fruit nourishes the system, which in turn protects a new seedling, later to become the replacement tree.

James Lovelock wrapped this up in his Gaia Hypothesis, which has always appealed to me.

Going bananas

We take bananas for granted; they are, after all, only an everyday fruit. But there's a whole bunch (pardon the pun) more to them than that.

I grow a "Brazilian dwarf," which I thought meant that the plants would be dwarf, but it turns out the name refers to the fruit, so they are unexpectedly tall. I also have a true dwarf which produces apple-flavored bananas, and I'm encouraging a struggling plant that supposedly produces bananas with red flesh. I also have ornamentals, meaning the fruit is inedible, with variegated leaves of a stunning red and green.

This photo, which I took at Fairchild earlier in the week, is of another ornamental. The fruit and flowers are simply spectacular. Click on the picture to see the flower's occupant.