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Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years
- karol 3mo ago[flagged]
- markx2 3mo agoWhere on earth do you get 'a hint of Sharia Law' from? Why are you adding something not mentioned to steer the conversation?
- inigyou 3mo agoThey're just being racist.
- 9dev 3mo agoTry watching a bit less Fox News and talk to real people sometimes. It helps.
- tomhow 3mo agoPlease don't post dreck like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- barbazoo 3mo ago> He pointed out that Musa Basjoos are not really for eating. > He said: "It's basically like having a mouth full of ball bearings with half a teaspoon of banana on them." Maybe we can iterate on the texture some more here.
- dnemmers 3mo agoPrior to human intervention, 'bananas' were small with tons of seeds.
- fhdkweig 3mo agoAnd that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. Every banana that has ever existed has been a clone of that one plant. Every so often, a new mutation occurs that gives us a new variety, but they all trace back to that one plant. It is the most extreme type of monoculture and is constantly threatened by parasites like the Panama Disease, because if one plant is vulnerable, they all are.
- chongli 3mo agoAnd that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. I don't think so. There are a ton of varieties of banana that are grown from seed. Humans have cultivated them and selectively bred them from seed for thousands of years, just like every other plant. The seedless bananas that dominate western grocery stores are 1 variety, Cavendish, that have been endlessly cloned from cuttings. They weren't the first seedless variety commercially available, they were preceded by Gros Michel. But either way, travel to southeast Asia and you'll find a lot more varieties on sale.
- Nursie 3mo agoIndeed, and there are unrelated bananas like the Fe’i which are also seedless, pointing to repeated cultivation to a seedless state by people.
- inigyou 3mo agoInterestingly, apparently the Gros Michel banana (which you can still get, if you try hard enough) tastes much more like artificial banana flavor, because that was the dominant variety when the flavor was developed.
- daedrdev 3mo agoIts simply a cost thing as the majority of gros michel bannana plants in areas with the fungus will die every few years as infection takes that long, and most areas gained the fungus during the peak of gros miachel cultivation. But at a small scale you can avoid the fungus or just plant new plants when the fungus takes hold, its just more expensive and limited in scale.
- fhdkweig 3mo agoHere is a photo of the seeds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_a_wild-type_banana.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_a_wild-type_banana...
- gwerbin 3mo agoIs the flesh soft and sweet like a modern cultivated banana? I wonder how different it is to eat one of those compared to something like a tamarind, which is also mostly seeds, covered in a relatively small amount of edible delicious stuff.
- flyingshelf 3mo agoI saw a banana tree with green bananas in Fribourg Switzerland in September 2025. According to Gemini this city is much colder than Essex, and yet.
- toasty228 3mo ago> According to Gemini this city is much colder than Essex, and yet And according to science Fribourg offers more growing degree days https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/45015~56049/Comparison-of-the-Average-Weather-in-Rayleigh-and-Fribourg https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/45015~56049/Comparison-of...
- flyingshelf 3mo agoHuh? Fribourg is literally colder, especially in September.
- toasty228 3mo agoSure, but there is a reason we came up with growing degree days, wikipedia is one click away
- jefftk 3mo agoOnly infinitesimally more (most of what that chart is showing is that the growing degree days come earlier in the year), and it also gets colder and has a shorter growing season. I'd expect most plants to like this less.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago> According to Gemini According to Gemini, lots of untrue things are true. More useful to look at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/World_Hardiness_Zones.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/World_Ha... and see if that makes more sense, although seemingly it's changing a bit and that graphic is quite old by now (2012). A plant's survival depends on more than just its hardiness and what zone it's in of course, but it's a useful starting point.
- inigyou 3mo ago[flagged]
- Planktonne 3mo ago> ...while we say goodbye to some old favourites. An incredibly dystopian way to minimise human-caused climate change and potential extinction for yet more species.
- pocksuppet 3mo agoPotential? The Holocene Extinction is already the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history, and that's pre-climate-change.
- Planktonne 3mo agoI know, but currently we still have rhubarb. The article is extremely blasé about even more species losing their environment.
- card_zero 3mo agoRhubarb isn't native to the UK. Its origins are mysterious (the "barb" is for barbarian) but I think it came over with the Romans. I had a feeling that the Tiber was named after rhubarb, but I'm remembering something wrong there evidently.
- sinuhe69 3mo agoWith these heatwaves, many cities in France, Italy and England are at times *hotter* than cities in the tropical SEA! No wonder the bananas are starting to fruit.
- roysting 3mo ago> He added that growing banana plants in the UK is not new for a "geek in the plant world", but perhaps still niche to the average person. Also, do you think that it may have something to do with being cities with stone and steel that absorbs and radiates heat, and that cities are no longer as filled with trees due to urbanization and immigration filling them with people? For context, London, Rome, and Paris have respectively gone from 2.6M, 175K, 1.05M populations to 14.5M, 4.3M, and 12.4M; so basically a 6–25x population size in ~125 years. You don’t think that may have something to do with it? More context 10 million people produce about 1-1.5 gigawatts of continuous heat energy alone. That’s energy that would also be absorbed into stone structures of European cities even if to an unapparent degree, especially in the summers.
- inigyou 3mo agoThis is the first time I've seen someone blame immigration for climate change.
- basisword 3mo agoYou'll catch people blaming their heart attacks and strokes on immigration before long.
- mike_hearn 3mo agoBecause you never looked. What he's saying is a true and well known problem in climatology. Population increases create an appearance of warming in the dataset. There are two sources of corruption. The first is the urban heat island effect. Many weather stations are corrupted because although they were once in fields or other natural sites, over time cities expanded to meet the needs of the growing population and ended up building around the stations. This distorts readings by pushing up the min on the min/max thermometers, as tarmac absorbs heat during the day and re-radiates it at night. If you compute the average temperature for a day by just taking the midpoint between the min and max this makes it appear that the site is warming even if the max doesn't change i.e. there is no actual climate warming. The second is that a large number of weather stations sit next to runways. It's intentional: pilots need to know runway temperature for takeoff calculations. But climatologists obviously shouldn't use them because not only are they next to tarmac, they're also being blasted with jet exhaust. So as population increases due to immigration (as western countries have below replacement fertility), jet travel goes up and this causes more traffic which warms the air at these weather stations. In some countries this is a serious problem. For example, the UK is very built up with unusually high population density. The World Meteorological Organization has a classification system for weather stations in which class 1 is the best (lowest uncertainty) and class 4/5 are the worst (uncertainty of 2/5 degrees respectively, which is higher than the 1.5 degrees of warming claimed to have happened since 1850). Unfortunately nearly 90% of all British weather stations are class 4 or class 5, but the Met Office still use them to make claims about record breaking temperatures. Climatologists have techniques they say correct for these problems, but the algorithms don't actually work. US GHCN uses something called homogenization, a kind of interpolation which spreads warmth from cities and runways into colder rural areas, creating an appearance of global warming across the entire dataset that's not there in the thermometer readings from uncorrupted sites.
- danans 3mo agoSeems like an opportunity to plug the latest video by my favorite YouTube long form documentary maker, OTR: The History of the Banana https://youtu.be/YVVD1cYelUE?is=ADLXFR_-mIMdDfom https://youtu.be/YVVD1cYelUE?is=ADLXFR_-mIMdDfom Here gets into ancient innovations that allowed bananas to be grown outside of their native habitat in Papua New Guinea. If you haven't seen his content, and you get sucked in, then settle in without distractions - this is the opposite end of spectrum of TikTok, etc. Also, don't watch his "History of Sugar" documentary if you are feeling depressed. Instead watch the "History of Curry".
- dataviz1000 3mo agoIf you like this long format style of video, you might enjoy Asianometry, "video essays on business, economics, and history." [0] Here is a video on the banana also, "The Wildly Infectious Banana Plague." [1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OsiD_s00RQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OsiD_s00RQ
- MPSimmons 3mo agoI'll second this. I'm continually impressed with the breadth of coverage from Asianometry. Great channel.
- tambourine_man 3mo agoI wish Jon would post a video on his research methodology.
- caminanteblanco 3mo agoAsianometry is one of the rare gems among youtube channels, along with Alexander the ok [0] and Technology Connections [1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/@Alexander-the-ok https://www.youtube.com/@Alexander-the-ok [1] https://www.youtube.com/technologyconnections https://www.youtube.com/technologyconnections
- rdedev 3mo ago
- mytailorisrich 3mo agoI have several banana plants in my garden in Southern England. Musa Sikkimensis and Musa Basjoo, 3+m tall at the moment. Winters are too cold for them here. So either you heavily mulch them and they start from the roots every spring while the stems die in winter. Or you learn how to wrap the stems to protect them over winter. It might be possible, or borderline to keep them unprotected within London but outside of there and inland temperatures can drop below -5C even in the South. On the other hand, I think they have started growing tropical fruits like mangos and bananas in Sicily.
- ksec 3mo agoUm. I wonder if there are any export opportunities for British Bananas ?
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- kratikanarad 3mo agoLovely
- glasffordd 3mo ago[dead]
- TabTwo 3mo agoLast year ours bloomed, too. The problem is that it happens to late in the year and I can’t wrap that 5m high “tree” to protect from the cold. So the bananas were the size of your pinky. Next problem, once they bloom, they die. So yes, climate change is real. For comparison, we are located in south Germany near Stuttgart and we also have a fig tree and an olive tree in our garden.
- riffraff 3mo agoAre figs rare in central europe climates? I live in Hungary and they seem to be relatively widespread, if not as much as in southern Europe.
- fransje26 3mo agoThe climate in Hungary is really not quite the same as in Stuttgart...
- account42 3mo agoWe have had figs in southern Germany for decades. Not all varieties grow well here of course but just having figs growing doesn't really tell you much.
- riffraff 3mo agoI honestly don't know. We do get to subzero temperatures relatively easy in winter in Hungary, it's quite a different climate from Greece and Italy.
- fransje26 3mo agoFrom a Wikipedia comparison - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart#Climate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Budapest#Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Budapest#Data (I took Budapest, for the sake of generality, from [1] it is clear that there are significant variations in Hungary) You can see that the mean temperatures from April to October are about 2 degrees higher in Budapest than in Stuttgart, which is really significant. To give you an idea, that's a lot closer to Avignon (France) [2], which is a Mediterranean climate, than to Stuttgart which is considered oceanic. I also remember people saying that they could get 2 harvests of figs a year in Moravia (CZ), which you will not get in Germany. Moravia is not Hungary, but it's getting there, climate-wise, and it illustrates nicely the difference a few degrees (mean) make. [1] https://www.met.hu/en/eghajlat/magyarorszag_eghajlata/altalanos_eghajlati_jellemzes/homerseklet/index.php https://www.met.hu/en/eghajlat/magyarorszag_eghajlata/altala... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avignon#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avignon#Climate
- comrade1234 3mo agoI have a paw paw tree that has survived 7 years in northern Wisconsin. Unfortunately it is the only one out of five that I planted that has survived and so I'll never get fruit because they reproduce sexually and as far as I know the closest one is 4 hours south in Madison.
- gus_massa 3mo agoThere are dating sites for dogs. You may create a dating site for trees.
- pvaldes 3mo agoGraft a steam with a different variety and then you will need a lot of flies, or a brush and some artistic strokes in May.
- culi 3mo agoPawpaws are actually hermaphroditic not dioecious. Your tree produces female flowers first and later in the year produces male flowers. This is to prevent self-pollination. However, you can save some male pollen until next year. Alternatively, you could graft the branch of a pawpaw that flowers earlier to try and get the male and female flowers maturing at the same time. You might also be able to just buy some pollen. It's actually quite easy to collect. You can use a brush to sprinkle it on a female flower
- amarant 3mo agoWait would that work? My understanding was that the pollen had to come from a different genome of pawpaw for it to work... But perhaps I'm mistaken?
- culi 3mo agoHmm I guess you're right. Most cultivars seem to be self-incompatible. Like most self-incompatible plants though, it's not 100%. Some cultivars like "Sunflower" don't seem to mind at all
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- forinti 3mo agoIn South America there's a very aggressive spider that lives on the bananas (genus Phoneutria). Spiders usually shy away from humans but these attack and have a very nasty venom. I wonder if the heat will take nasty critters to Europe.
- pvaldes 3mo agoPhoneutria are interesting animals. Needed to evolve defenses against the gluttony of monkeys. It must be a tasty spider. It happens that we are monkeys also, so the venom is carefully designed against us. There is a registered case of a Phoneutria bite in UK at least, and the chef was sent directly to an hospital. To be fair, they dislike the cold so the spider had its reasons to be upset when he opened the fridge to grab a banana. The spider is easily identified because it has four identical small frontal eyes arranged as a perfect square. Is big, bold and it warns before to attack [1] (most tarantulas are shy). And it jumps, of course. Can hide, once in a blue moon, in exported South American banana bunches (European breed bananas are spider free). [1] If it raise the legs showing the yellow and black rings beneath is a clear warning saying "get lost right now, of I will land on your face"
- forinti 3mo agoThe ones I know are completely brown. They put their four front legs together, two by two, and sort of point at you. I was told that they are aggressive because they are well fed because they feed on the sap from the bananas whereas most spiders are usually hungry.
- whyenot 3mo agoWandering spiders do not feed on banana sap. They hunt small invertebrates on the forest floor at night and hide among bananas, or other dark and protected locations during the day. The defensive posture you described is one way to help identify them.
- whyenot 3mo agoIt turns out that Phoneutria defensive bites are most often "dry" with little if any venom. It's thought that the spiders conserve venom for use on actual prey items. BTW, the four frontal eyes in a box is not considered a good taxonomic character for IDing them, as spiders in other related genera also have this. They do have a warning posture, but not a "dance" that I am aware of. Also, they are terrestrial and hunt on the forest floor. The stories of them "jumping" are largely exaggerated.
- DivingForGold 3mo ago... Botanist James Wong has appeared on the BBC's A Countryside Summer Wong, 45, has presented for BBC series' Grow Your Own Drugs and Secrets of Your Food. Curious what is the latest on genetic improvement of banana against Panama disease ?
- PaulRobinson 3mo agoThe UK straddles the 55th parallel North. Due to the jet streams (and formerly, trade winds) carrying warm air from the Caribbean, it has often benefitted from a milder climate than other regions at similar latitudes: Alaska, Siberia, the Baltic states. But this is wild. I am only in my 40s but I've seen the climate change significantly and it having a major impact on flora and fauna. When I was a kid, English wine was a joke and now it's winning prizes because we have the same climate French vineyards did when I was a child. The idea of growing olives in the UK was laughable, but now in the South East of England it's starting to look commercially viable. Only 10 years ago I remember days with highs over 30C being rare, but we just had two weeks of them, accompanied by tropical nights (not dropping below 20C), for the first time I remember. And now... bananas. Which is, pun intended, utterly bananas. It feels too late to stop the worst of the damage, but the idea of this accelerating and getting worse is just astonishing to me, that within my lifetime I'd witness such a huge swing in climatology.
- fritzo 3mo agoJust wait till the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation halts, then you can grow icicles!
- ndsipa_pomu 3mo agoHopefully we've got at least 10 years until that happens
- modo_mario 3mo agoIsn't the effect a bit overstated (ie european climate would still be somewhat similar to western canada) and wouldn't the UK specifically still benefit a lot from it's ocean climate moderation (less extremes including cold)
- riffraff 3mo agoPeople/companies are already testing avocado, banana, and coffee plantations in Italy at scale. Climate change really is insane.
- ebbi 3mo agoSlightly off-topic: When I used to eat banana-flavored things (milkshakes, chocolate bars, etc), I always thought that the flavor was artifically inflated and tasted nothing like an actual banana... ...until I went to Fiji. Externally, the appearance of the banana would probably render it as waste in Western countries as it doesn't look nice and yellow - and looks close to what an overripe/rotten banana looks like, but gosh they tasted amazing!
- zakki 3mo agoIt looks like Javanese call that banana as Gedhang Kluthuk (Stone Banana, direct translation). The owner can use it to make a super delicious Rujak Cingur.
- oliyoung 3mo agoThere were hippo bones found under Trafalgar Square, and once-upon-a-time (10kya) elephants, lions, and rhinos were once endedmic to Britain
- stuaxo 3mo agoIn a couple of years all the head in the sand types will be commenting that "we've always grown bananas in the UK".
- alexpotato 3mo agoThis reminds me of the stone carvings found in Scotland showing grape vines growing there. In other words, it used to be MUCH warmer in the northern latitudes.
- snthpy 3mo agoThe UK does seem more like a banana republic each year.