Banana drama! Monty Don’s had his struggles with banana plants

Bananas have become a mainstay of our Jewel Garden, providing dramatic, sculptural structure with their enormous leaves from late spring until autumn.

All bananas thrive in rich, moist soil and so they love our rich clay loam. Bringing them out of winter protection, encouraging them into fresh growth, hardening them off and then planting them out into the borders once the risk of all frost has gone has become one of our annual gardening rituals.

But it was not always so. I came to bananas as a border plant almost by accident.

We visited the Canary Islands for a holiday some 25 years ago and I bought some banana seeds at the airport.

Back home, these grew into a couple of healthy plants of Musa basjoo with strapping great leaves. M. basjoo is one of the hardiest of all bananas and the one most likely to survive winter – in a southerly, sheltered garden.

My friend and fellow Gardeners’ World presenter Joe Swift has a huge specimen in his garden in east London.

But Herefordshire is not Hackney. Our winters are much colder, wetter and longer and despite erecting a horticultural fleece-covered frame, which I packed with straw all around the plants, both of them had rotted and died when I unwrapped them the following spring.

I assumed the brief banana experiment had been a horticultural failure. But then, six years ago, I became seduced by a magnificent display of the Abyssinian banana, Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’, at Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.

It was the most dramatic plant I had ever seen, with a deep, rich, burgundy colour to its enormous leaves. So I ordered two, which have been a mainstay of the Jewel Garden ever since.

However, they are completely tender and there is no question of leaving them outside in the garden over winter – at least in all but the very warmest British gardens.

Every October they have to be cut right back, with all their leaves removed to leave just a stump. Their roots then need to be trimmed and the sad remnant potted up and put into the cool, dark tool shed for the next six months.

I keep some fleece next to both plants and drape them with it if frost is forecast, and I’ve put a heater into the tool shed on really cold nights.

They need to be kept cool so they remain dormant over winter, while being protected from frost. Ironically, I lost a smaller Ensete variety a couple of years ago by storing it in a greenhouse.

It was one of four bananas I had bought, including two of the Cavendish banana, M. cavendeshii, which saved the banana industry in the 1950s when the world’s then main banana variety, ‘Gros Michel’, was wiped out by a virus.

The Cavendish, which had been brought to Britain in 1830 by the head gardener of Chatsworth House, Joseph Paxton, came to the rescue and now supplies most of the five billion bananas sold each year in the UK alone.

All four of my plants were in pots in the greenhouse, but the Ensete was nearest to the glass and had put on new growth, and one very cold night it was frosted and killed – even though it was inside a heated greenhouse. They really are very sensitive to cold.   

THIS WEEK’S JOB: CUT BACK LAVENDER

Prune lavender as soon as flowering is finished to keep it bushy and looking good, and to allow any subsequent growth time to harden off before winter. Cut back hard but leave a little of this year’s new growth because sometimes lavender will not regrow from old wood.