Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Daw
What actually you could try, if you don't mind the seeds, is Musa paradisiaca, or at least this is what they call this plant in Turkey. It has seeds and crosses with other bananas, but the seeds are actually tiny, when I should compare it, like the seeds in watermelon.
I include the picture as well. In Europe, this plant is also labelled as Musa 'French Plantain'.
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Musa paradisiaca is not a real plant, and the photo shown here looks like a normal 'Cavendish' banana, those little black dots are undeveloped ovules, not seeds. This confusion is very persistent all over the place, Musa paradisiaca is a type name, it is basically equal to "banana" and does not refer to any specific plant. A type of French Plantain was the plant that was originally described as Musa paradisiaca, but with modern science we now know that it is not a valid wild species, and thus the name M. paradisiaca is kept for historical purposes to mean any banana since it was the first that was described. Edible bananas have their own, non-Linnean-binomial naming system which has been in use by banana researcher since the 1950's, but still many resources use the old naming conventions that were used for bananas over 200 years ago.