Quote:
Originally Posted by bikoro child
Here in France we use to say that most of basjoos cannot produce seeds because they are of Tc..A friend of me has an ancient clump of basjoo(in my area basjoos are grown since about a century and las year visiting his garden we found some bananas with seeds ;i tried to germinate them but with no success.My friend gave me a pup so i'll see in the future what could be done with it...
here are the seeds(but the banana was unripen) |
Hi Ivan,
I have seen pictures of underdeveloped seeds on Basjoo on a few occasions before,
In Europe and the US.
It could be that on rare occasions basjoo can produce seeds without pollination! It’s a strange phenomenon but some times sterile edible bananas can produce seeds too.
As far as tissue cultured plants been sterile, I can accept that’s possible for some but not all t.c. Basjoo.
Musa basjoo has been around for at least 120 years in Europe, rumours about them not been able to produce seeds started long before tissue culture and t.c. Basjoo has only been around for the last 15/20 years to feed the rise in popularity in exotic gardening.
Although provenance is often hard to prove we do appear to have a good selection genetic diversity in basjoo with material coming from Japan and china.
A big part of the problem could be basjoo produces the male flowers after the female flowers are spent, so avoiding self pollination, that cant be the sole reason though, you do see large old mats of basjoo in the UK and France and they have never produced seed like they do in the wild!
I have yet to see a picture of a basjoo in some ones garden with a full set of seed baring hands… that’s one that hasn’t been hand pollinated.
So I think whatever pollinates basjoo in China we don’t have it.
Tony