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While trekking in PNG I took lots of photos - people, scenes, plants and also textures. It was the interest in textures that focused my attention on a "fallen log". In the low light under the jungle canopy it looked strange, and interesting. Then it suddenly dawned on me, I was looking at the texture of old banana trunk. Except that this one was gi-normous, to put it mildly. The crown was already broken up, rotted away. But the deteriorating trunk was so huge you couldn't put your arms around it, and it was really long.
I said to one of the locals "It's a giant banana!" He just responded that it was "A bush banana". We'd seen plenty of the smaller ones, especially in abandoned village gardens. I looked around and then saw some amongst the tall rainforest trees up the slope. Their trunks were the size of other large trees, and were of the same height. Just towering up into the canopy.
In the photo the closer tree (middle) is clear but a bit further back to the right is a larger trunk. It was hard to get a good picture in the fairly dense jungle of something so large.
I found the old fruit stalk which was small by comparison to the plant, but much the same size as the cultivated bananas. The fruit was all gone. Further along the track I saw another lower in the valley which was fruiting. The bunch wasn't very big but the male part of the inflorescence had strangely rounded bracts, unlike the pointier ones I'd seen on other bananas.
As with the pandanuses, I felt like a Lilliputian in Gulliver's land.
These were on the slopes of Mount Bellamy, in Oro Province, lower down than where I saw most of the pandanus. Possibly it's very widely spread throughout mountainous regions of PNG, and perhaps Irian Jaya (West Papua). But I understand it won't grow in tropical lowland areas, has a very limited tolerance range of temperatures, neither too high nor too low.
You can see the rounded flower bracts in the photo, even though it's a bit of a poor shot, being against a bright sky.
This is the largest known banana species in the world. Unfortunately I can't recognise the difference between juveniles of these and other species. I probably passed many small Musa ingens without knowing it.
That brings back memories! It is unbelievably huge! Yes you're right, its a high altitude species only.
I have a vague recollection that it is one of the few (only?) Musa species which doesn't sucker (like Ensete), but I am dredging that up from the 70's part of my brain LOL, so may be quite wrong.
I'd known about this banana from reading about it years ago. But actually seeing it was just mind-boggling. Now that you mention it, the plants seemed to stand singly. They were too far apart to have been suckers of a parent plant.
I'd love to grow some of these, unfortunately they're tropical montane species, won't take high heat, nor too cold. Plus need constant high humidity. But it's too hot here (tropical lowlands), humidity can get low, and we get stronger winds than what they're used to.
