Bananas

We eat a lot of bananas. In UK we over 5 billion bananas each year. Most come from Caribbean. They are of the 'Cavendish' variety. And where did that originate? The answer is not Trinidad, nor Thailand, but Derbyshire in England.

"Buy a banana and it will almost certainly be descended from one plant grown at an English stately home. Sitting in picture-perfect Peak District grounds, Chatsworth House seems an unlikely birthplace for today's global banana industry. But practically every banana consumed in the western world is directly descended from a plant grown in the Derbyshire estate's hothouse 180 years ago." (Paxton the gardener. Paxton had been trained at Kew Gardens.

Bananas come from 'plantains', which grow all over the East Indies

They were spread round the south east asia, as a cooking plantain, by people local to the Pacific. Somewhere around 500 AD, these were introduced to Africa - but not as we know them today. They were small and green. Now they are large and yellow. (explain how it has changed from diploid to quadruploid (or tripLOID?) version, What does that mean?)

Dwarf Cavendish came from Southern China via Mauritius in early 1800s to Duke of Devonshire's (whose family name is Cavendish) Estate at Chatsworth estate in Cheshire - where it was grown! 

In 1830 the then head gardener Joseph Paxton got his hands on a specimen imported from Mauritius. courtesy of the chaplain of Alton Towers, whose fame then was other than providing dangerous rides. He planted it with rotted soil, dung and kept it warm A few years later the duke supplied two cases of plants to a missionary named John Williams to take to Samoa. Only one survived the journey but it launched the banana industry in Samoa and other South Sea islands (Williams himself was killed by natives). (more)  It is believed that some of them may have ended up in the Canary Islands, (more)

Now Cavendish is the most popular banana in the world. More on Cavendish at Chatsworth. Cavendish replaced 'Gros Michel' as main variety grown in the 1950s when the latter hit by  Panama disease (fungal wilt). Cavendish grew in soil previously infected with this disease. The variety accounts for 95 per cent of the bananas shipped to export markets including the United Kingdom, in a trade worth £5.4bn. 

That was until 2008 - when bananageddon struck. Now we face losing one of the world's most-loved fruits in similar fashion to demise of Gros Michel. See 'Cavendish' Bananas imminent death 

Where our bananas are grown now. 

Most bananas  sold on the British market are exported from Latin America, and increasingly West Africa. Details from from Bananalink Once again the main centre of export is on the other side of the world from which they were originally cultivated.