wim

I'm confused about the relationships (differences) between Musa, Musella and Ensete. Musa is "banana", Musella (lasiocarpa) looks like a small banana plant, but what with Ensete

Is it something like the relationship between "onion" and "leek"? They both belong to the allium family, but are somehow different?

Does this imply that they need to be treated differently ?

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With kind regards
Wim

Gard

Musa, Musella and Ensete are all in the Musaceae family.

Musa is the only of them that will make edible bananas. Musellas and Ensete won't get edible banans.

There are certain things that makes Musellas, Ensetes and Musas different, though they do look pretty much the same. Look at pictures of diffent banans, it helps.

Other people know a lot more about this, I've just picked up a few things.

Gard

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PaulOdin

The biggest difference I see between Musella and Ensete is that the Ensete don't put out pups. However, my experience is limited to lasciocarpa and maurelii.

Paul

Gabe15

It is basic taxonomic classification. All plants are divided into groups, and thus the banana family (Musaceae) is divided into 3 different genera (Musa, Musella and Ensete). These are seperated by physical differences in the plants, not nessacerily by where they come from or how they should be grown. Infact all 3 of these genera have overlaping populations somewhere. Although if you want to get fancy, really Musella is much closer to Ensete than Musa, that is one reason it has had trouble finding a name, for awhile it had been switching back and forth between Musa lasiocarpa and Ensete lasiocarpum. Musella is somewhat of an intermediate of characteristis between Musa and Ensete, so it was given its own genus, of which there are 2 species at this time. They are all bananas, just different species, at one point all bananas were called Musa, even the ones that are Ensete today, so you can see they are indeed close enough to question the difference, but modern botany has defined those differences. The big obvious difference as Paul mentioned are the sucker/flowering habits. Ensete are called "monocarpic" plants which means they flower only once in thier entire lifetime then die completely and have to come back from seed produced, no suckers are ever formed naturally. Musa and Musella can both produce suckers and thus the same plant can flower many times.

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Growing bananas in Colorado, Washington, Hawaii since 2004. Commercial banana farmer, 200+ varieties.