john_ny

I had an aquarium fish import business, and we sold a few plants also. I traveled a lot, and would bring fish and plants back from all over. My wife is a hospital operating room supervisor. Many years ago, her chief of surgery, and his wife, invited us to come with them to a vacation home that they had, in St. Lucia. A close friend of theirs, down there, had built several of the hotels on the island. He got me permission to take cuttings from the hotel plantings. I also made several trecks out into the jungle, and collected many things from the wild. There were bananas everwhere. This was when the island was still British - before they became independent, so almost everything they used came from the U. K. ( a bottle of catsup, in a restaurant, said on it, "H. J. Heinz & Co., Ltd., London) Conversly, almost everything they produced was shipped to the U. K. When I asked about the bananas, it was arranged for me to get a few corms to bring back. I was also told that they were Gros Michelle, not what we were getting in the U. S. because, it was explained, the Britis, "preferred a slightly smaller banana than Americans."
The bananas were potted, and brought to my store, for sale. This is when I learned about sunburn and gradual aclimatization. Some charity was holding a flea market, in a shopping center parking lot. It was in full sun, with no protection, I took some of my plants there and, within a matter of hours, the bananas had turned completely white, from sunburn.
We had been down to the island, on several subsequent visits, and I brought more back each time. When we moved into this house, we had a pair of glass patio doors, in a finished basement. I put a couple of potted naners next to the doors and, pretty soon, they were pushing the tiles out of the suspended ceiling. Some time after that, I started dealing with Agri-Starts and have, since, brought up many more varieties, along with countless other plants.

__________________
John