A rare maia hapai — Hawaiian pregnant banana — underwent a
pseudo-cesarean section Saturday revealing the compacted and
glistening fruit in the banana’s trunk. As Amy B. H. Greenwell
Ethnobotanical Garden Manager Peter Van Dyke sliced open the
swollen banana tree’s trunk, a foul smelling liquid poured out
and slender, tightly held-together bananas and a coiled stem
emerged. It’s a rare event for a rare plant that bears its fruit
within its stem just once, maybe twice a year, at the Captain
Cook gardens, which have three to four patches of the maia hapai
variety. The maia hapai is a variety found in Hawaii and areas
of Polynesia, said Van Dyke. It falls within the musa genus,
which includes most species that produce edible bananas as well
as dwarf and ornamental species, he said. Normally, the pregnant
banana variety bears fruit through the top of its stem, however,
the variety periodically bears the fruit within its stem.
Because the tree grows from a main underground stem, or rhizome,
it doesn’t require sexu