51st state

Ralph's site is excellent, I've traded plants with him a couple of times. glad to see the Germans are as mad as us.

by the way Free Translation and Professional Translation Services from SDL is very useful

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embudu

replace the words Scheinstämme by pseudostems and Umbaung is a misspelling for Umbauung and means shelter or in this case winterprotection. bepflanzt means planted, Stauden is the whole bananaplant or perennials, Sprösslinge can be replaced by shoots, matschig(en) = rotted or muddy, Farbtupfer means spot of color

tony palmer

Thanks Embudu, It's a bit hard to read because it translates the words and leaves the grammar all back to front but you get the gist so it's better than nothing.
my grammar is back to front anyway


Tony

bigdog

I've seen those sites before. Ralph is a madman. LOL! One thing I'd like to point out on his site, is that Musa itinerans v. guangdongensis is not 'Burmese Blue'. 'Burmese Blue' is probably not even in cultivation yet, but a few could have it. It grows a pseudostem almost as tall as var. xishuangbannaensis, around 30-35 feet tall. Var. guangdongensis pseudostems top out at around 4.5 meters, according to Hakkinen's description. Another thing, is that var. guangdongensis has a clumping habit, not a rhizomatous habit. The one in the picture on the German forum clearly has a rhizomatous habit.

One other thing...Ralph's Musa itinerans 'Yunnan' banana is actually Musa yunnanensis. He has pictures of it flowering, which made it real easy to ID. Interestingly enough, he has another banana correctly identified as M. yunannense (well, should be yunnanensis) that is flowering as well. It looks identical to the other one!

tony palmer

Frank its worth pointing out that although in the wild these forest bananas grow very tall because there competing for light, when grown in the US and Europe they will flower at half the recorded height of that in the wild and some times less then that,
For example

In the wild Basjoo will flower on a 5 meter stem some times more, for us 2.5m?
In the wild Yunnanensis 10 meter stem, for us 3 meters. Look at Ralph’s picture it doesn’t look very tall to me.
I bet the same could be said of Xishuangbannaensis whenever we get the chance to try it. I just don’t won’t people to be put of trying them because of the height they attain in the wild

griphuz

Hi Frank,
What pictures do you mean exactly, on what page are they?
I am having a little trouble in my collection trying to positively identify my species as I got the tags mixed up last fall,...
So I'm looking for positively ID'd pictures of the species and varieties.
Regards,
Remko.

bigdog

You are correct, Tony. We can't expect to get the same height in our temperate areas that they do in the tropics. I think the biggest factors are rain, heat, and humidity. Their rainy seasons are ridiculous! We are lucky to get 2-3 inches of rain in August, and sometimes get less than that. They measure their annual rainfall in meters, lol, whereas we measure in inches. It's not even close. The humidity can frequently be 100%, and temps will stay in the 90s consistently all summer, spring and fall. Then there is the organic matter that falls continuously onto the forest floor, feeding the plants. The soil is usually quite poor in the tropics, with some exceptions, so the plants need this continous supply of organic matter.

Musa yunnanensis won't get 10 meters. It maxes out at about 5 meters in the wild, according to Hakkinen's description. That Ralph got a flower on it is pretty cool! He must've overwintered that in the greenhouse, no? I did notice that it was a fairly small pseudostem to be flowering. Nevertheless, it is definitely M. yunnanensis and not M. itinerans. The male bud is very easily distinguishable from M. itinerans.

tony palmer

I got to thinking about this a couple of years ago after a visit to Kew gardens in London Frank, in the Temperate house they have had Basjoo for many years but on my last visit I noticed they had planted two stands of Basjoo outside in front of the temperate house, those inside and the ones outside were all flowering the ones inside were flowering at 3-4 meters but the ones outside were just over 2 meters,about average for outside in the UK.

I got my information on the height of those bananas from the Nature products site, not the best place to gather your information from

tony palmer

Hi Frank, i have used the Babel fish translator to try and find out how Ralfe had protected yunnanensis, But he does'nt mention it ,I would have thought though that he would have kept it frost free somehow.
The translation is'nt perfect but the pictures are exellent.

Translation result for http://pflanzen.plusboard.de/musa-yunnanense-bluete-gegen-musa-itinerans-yunnan-bluete-t4863.html

embudu

on his site Bananenzentrum Karlsruhe - Bananenzentrum you will find an answer Bananenzentrum Karlsruhe - Bilder von meinen Bananen - Bananensaison 2008

by the way Roland updated his site Was zuletzt verändert wurdewith an Maurellii documention and a video of his bananagarden